Frame of Mind
by kangeiko
Summary: After a dig at Syria Planum goes awry, IPX dispatches a team from its New Technologies division to investigate.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Frame of Mind (The Eye of the Storm Remix)  
Author: **kangeiko**  
Summary: After a dig at Syria Planum goes awry, IPX dispatches a team from its New Technologies division to investigate.  
Fandom: Babylon 5  
Characters: Mr Morden, Mary Kirkish, Anna Sheridan.  
Rating: PG-13 for swearing and sexual situations.  
Disclaimer: I don't own them.  
Original story: Before Any Coming Storms by **aris_writing**.  
A/N: This monster was betaed by a great many people, all of whom worked very hard to fix my mistakes. For this, I am very grateful indeed, and if any snaphus sneaked in there anyway, it's entirely my own fault.

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**2255**

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I.

In the old days, before humans had telescopes or satellites or shuttles with which to view the world, when they had no way of seeing that did not involve their naked eyes turned heavenward, they imagined Mars as red, scarred and pock-marked as burnt flesh. A tale has it that this bright, virulent colour came to be because of all the blood spilled across it, staining the sands and running over it like rivers. All this was known and dreamt of, eons before grasping human hands strung together bits of glass and metal and humanity looked up at the sky, at the red planet blazing down. Centuries later, the wandering eyes cast heavenward grew ever more curious about the starry sky as, slowly, the tentative spiders' webs of terraforming stretched across it. The early explorers romanticised it with tales of Martians and of canals; the deep grooves the only remnant of a vast and terrible alien empire. It was, perhaps, an even more fanciful idea than the child sacrifices watering the sands.

Unlike those old dreamers - and unlike the great unwashed, dreaming of gleaming metal domes and jobs for all - Morden thought that Mars was quite possibly the ugliest planet in the entire galaxy. In one thousand cubic feet of space, Mars Spaceport encapsulated all that was wrong with this planet. The air was recycled more per daily cycle than any other place on the planet, and it stank: sour sweat and old urine. It didn't help that it was crowded to the point of a safety hazard. The immigration queue alone stretched for half a mile, winding around itself to form more of an ordered mob than anything else. Above, fans rotated half-heartedly, moving fetid air from one part of the port to the other, trying to ease the impossible strain on the air recyclers. Several children just beyond the Mars/no man's land border were whimpering quietly, too tired to scream.

_This place is a giant coffin,_ Morden thought, no longer sure whether this was a bad thing. He'd been earth-born, like most of the émigrés, and pulled to Mars out of necessity rather than any real curiosity or inclination. Those dreamers flocking to the glittering domes - bright as bits of starlight from Earth's viewing platforms and beloved of so many schoolchildren - were utterly foreign to him; their motivation inexplicable. Even as one of those schoolchildren, he had preferred the things one could find in the dirt beneath his feet than in the cold spaces between the stars. Who would choose to live in sealed domes when fresh air was available a shuttle-ride away? It was beyond him, he'd told Denni in all seriousness. She'd laughed at him. _You'll change your tune when it comes to something that really matters to you,_ she'd said. _You're all that matters to me,_ he'd replied, all reflex. That had been before Sarah had been born, and maybe it had even been true. Certainly, he'd believed it to be the truth, and he remembered being a little hurt when Denni had smiled at him, a little sadly. _I'm not dead enough to matter to you._

He closed his eyes against the scrape of the flickering neon lights. She had been right, as usual. Denni had told him that it was why he'd gone into academia in the first place - as if she'd been there, and watched it happen - and why he'd chosen languages. _Dead languages, Morden. It makes all the difference._ And it had. He hadn't expected it to, but since arriving here… _You can't love live things,_ Denni had said, so certain, with not one iota of blame or anger in her voice - or maybe _he_ couldn't, maybe there was just something about him that couldn't cope with it. Live things grew and changed and ran away from you, or pushed you away. They cut their hair or changed their minds or said, _God, you're __stifling__ me, all right? I can't stay this way forever!_ and expected him to understand.

Sometimes, they expected you to love them back.

A shadow fell across him, and he opened his eyes, blinking. "What are you doing here?"

The light streamed from behind her, casting her face in shadow. He smiled. "Hello, Anna."

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	2. Chapter 2

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**2253**

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II.

Morden had never been a particularly big fan of Mars, not even as a child. Settled worlds didn't interest him that much, and _poor_ settled worlds with little to no terraforming effort interested him least of all. His arrival had thoroughly disabused him of any lingering romantic notions that he might have harboured about a red, barren wasteland. Not that it was the Marsies' fault; no, he didn't blame them at all. They'd been dealt a bad card, is all.

EarthGov were a stingy lot, all things considered. When space had started to get tight, five or so years previous, Geneva told the district councils to raise rents and tax the people accordingly. Thinning the demand for living space, they said. Only a government light-years away could have come up with something quite that stupid, of course, and the mere suggestion had been laughed right out by the Mars-born. Thinning the demand? _How?_ Where were the people who couldn't afford the residence taxes supposed to go? There wasn't an 'outside' for them to dwell in, and sleeping on the streets wasn't much better than sleeping in over-crowded apartments.

What Syria Planum Unitary Authority, and Melas District Council, and all the rest of them, had needed back then was not a paltry increase in tax income, but a great big pile of money with which they could build new domes. What Mars had needed (what Mars _still_ needed) was more _Mars_: more liveable space, more development areas. Predictably, when it came to shelling out for off-world capital, EarthGov was suddenly tightening its belt, rebuilding and restructuring after the Minbari war. Devastated areas had priority, and while they were sympathetic to Martian issues, Earth had casualties and disaster zones to tend to. The MarsNetwork commentators had chosen a few four-letter words in response that hadn't done a blind bit of good but had made the viewers feel marginally better. Used to Earther slights, even the most stoic Mars-born had been hard-pressed to swallow the sly insult. Not a priority area - not affected by the war - the nerve of them! Did Mars turn its back on the flood of refugees from Earth? Did they cite short resources and bar those scarps of humanity from their ports? It was the poor and desperate that Earth sent heavenwards, overloading the Martian domes. Food riots resulted, with thousands of casualties - and where was Earth then? Once more, turning its back on Mars, calling the unrest a Martian problem.

Left on their own, with dwindling resources and a restless populace, a year or so before Morden set foot on Martian soil, the councils clubbed together and came up with enough funds to rig a new cover for one of the old abandoned domes, long ago condemned for being unsafe. They moved a whole crowd of new families into the abandoned buildings with great fanfare and crossed fingers. It was fine for a while - long enough to raise everyone's hopes - and then the jury-rigged cover blew.

The deaths of over two thousand people hardly made an impact on the Earth news. Morden couldn't remember a single mention of it, in fact. ISN was too busy singing the praises of the new Babylon station, due to start construction any day now, to pay attention to a few thousand dead Marsies. An Earther would have screamed at the injustice of it. An Earther would have sued someone.

Mars dusted itself off, buried its dead, and all eighteen council reps met back in the Syria Planum Grand Chamber to talk it over. The resulting discussion had barely caused a blip on ISN, but it had been quite the spectacle on MarsNet, and he'd sourced himself a copy. When it came to figuring out the whims and demands of the people writing your budget, Richard Aspen had once told him, there's no such thing as 'over-prepared'. As team leader - and the person who had initially brought Morden on board with NewTech - Aspen hadn't steered them wrong yet. So, on the flight over, Morden passed up on a sleeping pill and blanket and instead sourced a black coffee, a data pad and earphones, watching the recorded conference on the small screen mounted in the back of the chair in front of him. It was a poor, scratchy recording, as government minutes often are, but it served him well enough.

When the tape started up, he thought that he recognised a few people from the newscasts, but it took him a while to put names to faces. They were _Martian_ politicians, after all; no reason for an Earther to know them. All right - 2252, March 18th, preliminaries and introductions, stacks of data, yadda yadda yadda - ah.

_"We're going to have to cap the refugee numbers, it's as simple as that,"_ Elena Yan said, with an air of finality. Her voice was tinny over the recording, and not helped by the periodic pops of atmospheric adjustment as Morden's shuttle accelerated. Yan was a tall woman, with a pale oval face and wide, almost masculine shoulders. Beside her, a small balding man silently took the minutes. The data crystal glowed periodically as it uploaded the data real-time onto the MarsNetwork and ISN.

_"Well, that's all well and good for Chryse Planitia and the rest of the Tharsis, but what about established centres such as Syria Planum?"_ Derek Holtz, Yan's counterpart at the Syria Planum UA, interrupted. "We already have immigration controls in place; the majority of our growth comes from internal birth rates." As the host of the conference, he sat at the head of the table, ostensibly chairing the discussion. _"Or are you suggesting that we regulate our own people as well?"_

_"You could encourage movement outwards,"_ Yan said stubbornly. _"The Tharsis domes still need people; that's why the immigration flood hasn't abated. If we stem the tide at Earth's point, and encourage those in the main centres to move outwards, it would solve our need for people on the fringes and ease your overpopulation pressures."_

_"That's a short-term solution,"_ the Isidis Planetia rep pitched in, finally breaking her silence. She was a middle-aged, somewhat dumpy woman; for a second, Morden couldn't place her.

Yan rolled her eyes, exasperated. _"You have a better idea, Kay?"_

Ah, yes: Kay Oko, Isidis Planetia Unitary Authority. Morden tuned out for a moment. Isidis Planetia and Chryse Planetia were on the far side of the Tharsis, well away from the dig site, and he wasn't too concerned with the minutiae of population control. Holtz, though, was someone he'd have to work with, and he was curious as to the man's 'tells'. Not much thus far - but maybe that was something all by itself. Back on the tape, another one of the Tharsis reps, Morgan, got to his feet and palmed the o/p, throwing up the EarthGov logo. _"Computer - schematic of London, Great Britain, Earth, one hundred metre cross-sec of builds from late twentieth to late twenty-first centuries. Show depth and height."_ A faint squiggly line appeared on screen, representing the London skyline. Then, in a blinding array of colours, deepening as time progressed, the builds. They started off fairly uniform, stretching upwards by no more than twenty metres on average, but, as the century pushed on - and as the population continued to increase - the lines started dipping downwards as well. Extra floors were added to extant buildings, pushing the basement level of the city downwards with each new wave of construction. Soon, the lines above and below were almost equidistant, with approximately 40% of the builds below-ground. _"Computer, stop. Freeze."_

_"That's disgusting,"_ Yan said, staring at the screen with ill-concealed nausea. _"Alan, tell me you're not being serious!"_

He waved a hand dismissively. _"Keep your panties on, Elena, I'm not suggesting we go all the way down. For one thing, Mars soil is different, and it won't take to being prodded too deeply. But you wanted something 'out there' as a solution, so here it is. We don't have any more dome space, but we have plenty of planet to drill down into. Oh, it won't last forever, and it won't solve the problem. But it'll buy us another half-century, maybe more."_

Holtz frowned, steepling his fingers. _"I admit that, on paper, it sounds workable. But -"_

_"It's not workable at all, it's treating it as a neo-Earth!"_ Yan again, and outraged. She rounded on Morgan. _"__This__ is what you've been working on? It's useless! Sure, you can build us more living quarters, but you'll kick up so much dust inside the domes in drilling that you'll break every filter we have! This isn't Earth, Alan, all that crap you'll kick up has to go somewhere and I, for one, would rather the air filters didn't wear out twenty years ahead of schedule. And even if you don't break the whole damn system - say you get your ten storeys underground. How are we supposed to get enough air in the domes for all those extra people?"_

Morgan shrugged. _"The filters won't break. We'll funnel everything out sideways, cart it outside the domes. Drill down from the outside, drill across 'til we're beneath the domes -"_

_"I can't believe we're following the Wily Coyote school of construction,"_ Yan said loudly. Morden almost smiled at that; he mentally bet a sizeable sum that it had been solely for the benefit of the cameras.

_"- sure, it sounds insane, but it'll work in Mars gravity."_ He levelled a glare at her. _"Don't __you__ make the mistake of thinking this a neo-Earth. Gravity's on __our__ side, here."_

_"And the filters? Long-term?"_

_"That, we didn't get around to discussing,"_ Oko admitted.

Holtz threw up his hands. _"Have a think on it, wouldja please? There's no point in building the damn things if we can't afford the people anyhow!"_

That first meeting, then, had not accomplished much, but that didn't really matter to Morden. He gathered the layout of the different factions, and the 'set' of the main players, which was more than enough. Holtz would be his main contact at the Syria Planum Unitary Authority – or, the NewTech contact, at any rate – and he thought that he was starting to get a handle on him. Well enough for the time being, in any case. He seemed a sensible enough man, and open to suggestions - blue sky or otherwise - that would help with his current problem. That, Morden could work with. He _was_ a little worried that the man appeared to have several conflicting priorities rather than an obvious agenda, but he couldn't do anything about it now. He skipped ahead to the rest of the pertinent data; much the same people, working through the logistics of selling the idea to the populace, and trying to figure out a way to make the actual thing _work_. The Syria Planum dome was chosen for the first round of digs, starting a few clicks out from the main settlement, in an area mostly covered by sand storms and rocky ground. Crappy for terraforming; ideal for waste dumping.

Skip ahead on the info tapes: the actual dig was irrelevant, now that it was on hold. What concerned him was on the prelim scouting data Aspen had sent through, and it was -

- there.

_Holy mother of God._ He sat forward in his seat, his forehead practically touching the screen. It was a little thing, only a glimpse - half a metre of exposed black rock, slick as oil, with some faint scratches -

- this was why Aspen had asked for him.

He sat back. _Fragging hell._ His palms were sweating.

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	3. Chapter 3

III.

When he first received Aspen's invitation to join the Mars project, Denni had jumped for joy and fucked him through their well-worn mattress. Morden had been receptive to the celebration, but less ecstatic about the idea itself. "It's _Mars_, Denni. I'm hardly going to be at the Hilton. It's a long way away, it's one of the most run-down places of the entire Alliance, and it might be a wasted journey anyway." They'd finished 'celebrating' and decided that refuelling was in order, grabbing some snacking food from the kitchenette and settling in the living area, close to where Sarah was staring in wonder at a pile of multi-coloured bricks. Morden pulled her into his lap and settled against the wall. "I'm keen for a challenge, but this looks like one of Aspen's pipedreams fell into a pile of funding."

"A pipedream, maybe. But you're going to go check it out anyway, I think."

He smiled and popped a grape into his mouth. "And why is that, precisely?"

Denni reached out and touched Sarah's small hands; sweet, plump fingers clutching something against her daddy's chest. "Because of this," she said, sadly.

He looked down at the sliver of black rock against his daughter's skin, sharp and terrible and fascinating, even for an infant. He sighed.

When he thinks on it now, he reasons that he didn't 'give in' but, rather, acquiesced to the inevitable, with as much grace as he could muster. At least, that's the way that he chose to think on it. He would have been just as happy on any similar dig, but Denni had some firm ideas about him being 'up and coming' and 'going places', and prodded his career along accordingly. _I'm saving you from academic inertia,_ she said, laughing. And it really was just easier to go with the flow.

Denni _was_ wrong on one front, though: nothing would come of this Mars project, of that he was certain. He trusted Aspen, but had lost a fair bit of faith in Aspen's ability to pull strings and get digs happening. The guy was good, but he was a civilian, like most of IPX. Trouble was, most digs these days were contracted out to IPX through obscure military connections, and any proposed excavations tended to need military approval. Morden had pretty much come to the conclusion that EarthForce was the galaxy's biggest cocktease, dangling the possibility of digs in front of NewTech and then snatching it away to hurriedly classify everything the moment things started to look interesting.

He touched the black pendant around his neck, almost without realising it. It was a silly thing to wear, maybe, but Denni had had it mounted as a gift, and he had now built up far too many memories around it to consider taking it off. Holding on to it had started off as a way of keeping Sarah's busy little fingers from slicing themselves open on a sharp edge, and had gradually faded into habit: a reminder that his family loved what he loved, that his family _was_ what he loved - and that he should not get his hopes up, because the military would come up with a way to screw him over yet again.

A couple of years previous, he'd been sitting pretty back in the lab, jumping for joy and unable to believe his luck. Aspen had all but run into his office with a stack of flimsies, and deposited them on his desk with an expectant look. The very top one was an aerial shot of a mostly-buried monolith of black polished granite, with only a meter or so visible. That was enough, though. Oh, God, it was _more_ than enough.

He'd stared at the stack for a while, then looked back up at Aspen. "You're kidding me."

"Nope." The sonofabitch had grinned at him like a kid at Christmas.

He'd looked back down at the stack again, picking up a flimsie and turning it towards the light. Even in that poorly-lit, crappy little lab he'd seen the faint scratches across the monolith's surface, like an insect's impressions on the dirt. It was a language, all right, but not like any language he'd ever seen before. Almost guiltily, he'd looked back up at Aspen. "You know, I'm not the only qualified linguist in the department. Other people have PhDs." Denni would have had his hide if she'd heard. She was always going on about him needing to be more assertive, to fight for those plum research jobs he pined after. Here one was, literally landing on his desk, and he'd tried to push it back to Stevenson and the rest of his cronies.

"Yep. But you're better than they are." Aspen'd smiled again, his bearded face stretching into a grin so wide it was almost a grimace.

And, just like that, he'd been bought. It hadn't been Aspen's enthusiasm, although that had certainly played a part. No: it had been that damned flimsie, the one that Aspen had set right at the very top of the stack. The rest had been more or less useless - graduate student work; Kim's supervision of the shots hadn't added one iota of quality, but, then, Kim was a complete idiot - but that top shot… God. It had given him nightmares.

He'd taken the whole thing home, high as a kite on the possibilities. Denni had still been nursing, and Sarah had started screaming more or less the instant he set foot home, so. The survey team had included some fragments of rock from one of the most damaged monoliths, and he'd been sent a tiny sliver in case his analysis required it. It was smooth and black, almost quartz-like in structure, and reminded him of the ruins of the Vietnam memorial in some ways. He'd fallen in love (in academic lust?) with it instantly, ordered a geochem breakdown and retired with a semantic map and the strongest coffee money could buy.

Some time later, he was back in the lab, practically vibrating from the amount of caffeine in his system. It had taken him three weeks of working all night and pissing off both Denni and Sarah in equal measure, but he had produced a thick hardcopy run of the first set of Ikaara translations. The footnotes alone accounted for over 70% of the actual surface space. He'd waited, impatient, for Aspen to skim through the abstract and the exec summary.

"Organic weapons?" When he finally looked up, Aspen's eyes were practically flashing credit signs.

He'd grinned back, visions of years of research; interstellar accolades; an actual office with an actual window; all dancing in front of him. He'd been practically salivating. "I'm almost totally sure."

"Organic technology?"

"Worth another look, isn't it?"

"Worth a raise - but don't quote me on that."

_Ha!_ Morden thought, grimacing in disgust. He'd waited for weeks - longer, even - as his notes were requisitioned and classified, piece by piece. Eventually, all that was left was the sliver of rock, no bigger than a man's finger; fallen through the cracks of paperwork. "I'll fix it," Aspen promised, and kept promising, long after Modern stopped listening. He took on other work - make-shift stuff - plodding ever-closer to his PhD. He spent more time with Denni. He took Sarah to parks, and introduced her to cake and to duckies. He swam more. Somewhere along the line, he is sure that he just plain forgot about the Ikaaran dig and the language that had kept him awake those nights, more than a year previous. _Liar,_ he thought, disgusted with himself. _You just changed the symbol, is all._

Even then, deep in his determined attempt at normality, the black sliver hung heavy about his neck.

*

The next morning, following a comm. call to her work that Morden had not been privy to, Denni informed him that she would be coming out to Mars precisely one week after his own arrival. He'd better find them some nice quarters, she said with a wicked smile, or there'd be hell to pay.

Them?

Well, yes. Unless she was supposed to leave Sarah on her own. "I know why you wanted to go to Ikaara, and maybe you _would_ have gone, if the dig had gone ahead. But this is here, _now_, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be the reason that keeps you from chasing after this a second time." She sighed a little, self-deprecating, and bent down to kiss him. Her long fingers tugged gently on the silver chain about his neck. "But I'm also a bit of a coward, Morden. I'm scared to let you go on your own, because I think that you'll fall in love with that place and never come back."

Fall in love with Mars? Not likely! _Not even the holy grail would keep me on that forsaken planet a minute longer than necessary._ He speared his bacon and attacked it with gusto.

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	4. Chapter 4

IV.

"Welcome to Mars Spaceport. Please have your landing cards and ID ready for inspection."

He arrived at some forsaken hour of the morning – five a.m., local time, near as he could figure – and tried to get his bearings. The immigration queue on his right was the first stop. He dallied over locating his cards, but the queue was significant, even at this hour, so he had plenty of time. Enough to start shifting from foot to foot at any rate, and pull out the prelim report for another look.

_It's the same language, all right, but that makes no sense. Ikaara 7 is several jump-points away, and with a liveable atmosphere. It's plausible to have a civilization rise and fall in situ. Mars is a big ball of dust; why would they send anything over here?_ A probe, maybe? The scans sent through revealed something big deep beneath the Martian soil, 300 or so feet down, below solid rock, where the prelim teams couldn't get at it. They'd have to bring in explosives to blast the top layer off, and go in with the heavy diggers – did they even use heavy diggers on Mars? There was something about the gravity here that he couldn't quite recall; either it helped or hindered – and then with smaller teams. Doubtless Aspen would be sending them down there with shovels and a portable scanner if he thought he could get away with it.

His arm was tiring; he shifted his carryall onto his other arm. The prelim scans showed something of a lesser density than the surrounding rockface, but not by much. Whatever was down there was packed tight. He wished they'd run some higher-frequency scans of the area, but no big loss, they could do that later. There weren't any photos included of the carved stone monolith, though, which made no sense. Why would the prelim team send through close-ups of the glyphs, but not of the overall positioning? He hoped like hell that no-one had had the bright idea of moving the thing into a lab, as their tender mercies would doubtless destroy more evidence than he could manufacture in a lifetime.

He reached the head of queue at last, and tucked the pad back into his side pocket. The immigration officer was a dour-faced woman, short, dumpy, and living her life according to a rationing of facial expressions, if the blank look she gave him was anything to go by. "Enjoy your stay," she said, completely devoid of inflection.

"Thank you, I shall." Humming a little, he went past the barrier, stopped, and looked around. Now what? Maybe he should try calling Aspen? He found a quiet corner and sat down, unzipping his carryall and rummaging around.

"Mr Morden?" He looked up. A woman, slim, thirty-ish, with a shock of fading blonde hair. She wore a plain blue jumpsuit; likely she'd been out at the dig before hopping the shuttle to come meet him. Nice effect, though: straight to business, no frills. "I'm Mary Kirkish."

Kirkish, Aspen's biotech expert. Right. "Ah – hi, yes, sorry," his carryall threatened to spill across the concourse. "Damn. One second." He stuffed everything back in, zipped it up and put himself to rights. "Dr Kirkish." He offered her his hand. "I'm Morden."

Her grip was firm, even. "Pleased to meet you, Mr Morden."

He threw a sideways glance at her as he shouldered the carryall, laughing a little. "Just Morden, please. Mr Morden was my father."

"Not a fan of first names?" She hazarded.

"No," he said shortly. She threw him a look, and he relented. "Old school habit." She smiled back at that and he relaxed a little. It wasn't fair to take out his fatigue on Kirkish, after all. "Where to, Dr Kirkish?"

"I'll take you to your hotel first – let you drop your stuff off, get settled in. We need to finish up the paperwork, anyway."

"Paperwork?"

"For immigration," she clarified. "They make it a pain on purpose, I think - the last thing they want is for you to set down roots and decide to stay!"

They reached the exit, where the crowded shuttles were ferrying people to hotels and major shopping centres in tin cans not much bigger than sardine tins. _Not much chance of that,_ Morden thought.

*

The hotel room was plain, but serviceable. It included a bath as well as a shower unit, the bellhop had proudly informed him, as if this was a great luxury. Actually, thinking on the likely issues with water, it probably was. Closer inspection of the units revealed that there was only so much water allocated per person per day. You could 'save up' units throughout the week, or build up a water debt that you paid for when you checked out. What the hell, he'd been travelling all day; he turned on the shower and stepped under the spray.

After refreshing a little, he did the usual unpacking-I-forgot-my-toothbrush rigmarole. At least he only had a few things with him. Most of his stuff would follow in a few days with Denni and Sarah. It would be good to see them again, he hadn't really had a chance to stay at home for a while. Mars needed engineers, just like everywhere else; Denni had already had half a dozen job offers. She'd keep busy enough, so grabbing a few days with them when they arrived would be a welcome blessing.

He kipped a little, still jetlagged from the journey, then woke; checked the time. Still a little time before he was due to meet with Kirkish. He phoned down to reception, and a helpful female voice told him that Dr Kirkish had filled in all of his residency requirements, and he was now registered with the local police. Swell.

What now? He glanced over the prelim work again, but he'd already worked out some initial impressions and prepped as best he could, and working on it any more would just stress him. He flicked through the local channels on the screen: sports – the Yankees striking out – ten million kiddies channels with animated monsters – the adult channel with faux!Centauri dancers – he barely noticed when he dropped off again.

His alarm woke him with half an hour to spare. "Damn." At this rate, he'd be late to his own funeral. Cursing a little, he had reception call him a flier for the main lab, and hurriedly stuffed the flimsies back into a satchel.

As it turned out, he needn't have worried, because Martin traffic was nonexistent at that time of day. Either that or the cabbie didn't necessarily follow any particular rules of driving. No matter: he reached the building with five minutes to spare. He met Kirkish on the steps outside, and was taken up to a fifth-floor observation room. "The others will be along in a minute."

The others turned out to be Aspen, and the UA head, Holtz. Introductions and handshakes; the usual platitudes. Finally, they crowded around the three small monitors showing the initial report, and the continuing feed from the dig. On the screen was the site as it currently was: angry and red, scarred and blasted as an open wound. The only colour were the grey metal struts of the scaffolding, and the couple of metres of exposed black _something_.

"We think it's alien in origin," Holtz said. Heaven only knew why the councilman felt the need to be there, but he'd struck Morden as a sensible enough person on the holo, so obviously something was up. Although, well - Denni was always warning him that he was entirely too trusting, but - it wasn't his job to be suspicious, was it? He was here to read glyphs; let Aspen worry about the politics of it.

"No shit." He stared at the screen. Aspen elbowed him in the ribs. "What? Ah, sorry."

"That's quite all right," Holtz said, visibly amused. "You're the expert, after all."

Morden made a non-committal noise in the back of his throat and moved closer to the screen. "Those look like blast marks," he said, pointing to the hard, shiny edges of the rock. "Here, and here."

"Yeah – we blasted away at the top layer, then went in with the diggers. Only to reach a couple of metres of the thing, mind you. We weren't aiming to excavate the entirety of it."

"No matter what Psi Corps thinks," Kirkish muttered.

Morden raised an eyebrow at the vitriol in her voice.

"You'll have to forgive Mary - she's not a big fan of Psi Corps. They've been a bit skittish about us blowing stuff up so near to one of their domes," Holtz explained. He nodded at the screen. "Rocks aren't the only things that get sheared away by too-large an explosion, and they don't want any tectonic activity near their generators. Can't say that I blame them."

"We cushion the fall-out perfectly well, as Psi Corps know," Kirkish snapped. "They're just causing trouble."

He was still studying the screens. "This is a bit limited. Can I go down there?"

Aspen rolled his eyes. "This may surprise you, but the project hasn't been sitting around waiting for your arrival with baited breath. There's a reason the place is empty." Morden raised an expectant eyebrow. "Well – Derek, you want to take over?"

"Not much to tell, really. There was an accident, and a man died," Holtz said bluntly.

Morden shook his head. "That's unfortunate, but I don't see why an industrial accident would –"

"Not industrial," Kirkish interrupted. She pulled out the stack of flimsies he'd been looking at earlier, rifling through them with quick, efficient movements until she found the snapshot of the markings. "Here. You wanted to know why we didn't take scans of the message surface? _We did_." She pulled out another shot, a aerial shot of the dig. From above, the surface of the probe was the same hard, black opaqueness as the language surface. "Those markings weren't on a plinth or a convenient bit of rock. They're on that damned thing."

Morden looked at the image of the markings. He looked at the aerial view. He looked at the image on the screen. "That's not the same surface," he said, very reasonably.

Kirkish laughed, a faint note of hysteria in her voice. "Not anymore, no! The fragging thing _changed_, right before our eyes. One minute we were excavating, the next – that message flashed up." She gestured to the markings. "One of the dig's people was stupid enough to approach it." She stepped closer, while both Holtz and Aspen, it seemed, were looking anywhere but at them. "He _touched_ it."

Christ. Morden looked back at the screen, at the hard, flat surface, black and greasy to the eye as an oil slick. There was something inherently repugnant about it, of the slickness of the surface and the arachnid shape. _Evolutionary response,_ he thought, somewhat dizzy. The mere thought of touching the slick skin of the probe, fascinating through it was, was nausea-inducing. Desire and disgust warred within him; disgust won out, and his stomach clenched. He reached up in a casual touch to his chest; just a quick graze of his fingertips on the cool, smooth rock to centre himself. "He died?" He asked faintly.

"Eventually," Kirkish murmured. "First he went mad. Psi Corps wouldn't touch him, said he was a terminal case. They just – closed the area."

God. Telepaths and _that_, it set off every fear response in his brain.

Aspen cleared his throat. "We're going to open it up in a day or so," he said, brusque. "Full contamination gear, and a good two-metre safety zone around it." He looked over at Holtz. "If that's all right with you, Derek."

Holtz shrugged helplessly and laced his hands together. "We can hardly leave it _sitting_ there. What if there are more of those things under the surface?"

That was not a particularly happy thought. Aspen looked like he'd swallowed a lemon.

"Well," Morden said, looking back down at the flimsies and the brief flash of markings. "We know one thing: whatever it is, and however many there are, this one, at least, was sent from the same place as the visitors to Ikaara 7."

Kirkish raised an eyebrow. "You're sure of that already? I thought that there was some variation in the, the –"she cast about for the word, "the _structure_ of the language."

"Yes, there is, but no more so than there is between Latin and Cyrillic. Those are syntactical differences, not semantic ones." He pointed at the second row of curlicues, beginning and mid-way through. "The two follow the same semantic patterns. I'm not a diachronician, but that level of congruence definitely indicates a single point of origin."

Aspen laughed at Kirkish's expression. "Morden was the one who wrote the initial linguistic analysis of the Ikaara discovery. It was why I asked him to come here."

Some fuss, after that – logistics, planning, starting the excavation up again. Morden asked for, and was granted, space in the small base near the excavation site. They'd set up a small domed area for their fieldwork, and while ordinarily linguistics wouldn't be getting top dollar, given the boom of the Ikaara find, Aspen was willing to consider alternate routes. By which logic, Morden figured, Kirkish had refused to sacrifice any more of her people to trying to do hands-on research on the biotech. Well, so much the better. There was no use in prodding at the thing if they couldn't figure out what it did.

If they blew up the planet, _someone_ was going to get it in the neck.

*


	5. Chapter 5

V.

His first view of the alien probe was everything he had feared. In his mind, he had already settled on the ideal scenario: accompanied by the various techs re-opening the site, he'd settle down in front of a blank, black wall, and, in short order, the wall would start to flash messages at him. He'd record to his heart's content, then go off for a bit to analyse said recordings. A few days at the probe, a few days analysis: the fieldwork done and dusted in a mere few months, with ten years of further study required.

Of course, the 'fieldwork and a fully-staffed research lab' boast on the NewTech recruitment posters was a complete lie. You rarely got either one of these; both? Forget about it. For the Ikaaran dig he'd been stuck back on Earth, looking at bad holos and third-hand data. Here, it was likely that he'd have all the research resources he could ask for, but the probe itself wouldn't cooperate. _Well, other than to respond to idiots like that grabby guard,_ he thought as he was led around the corner. He stopped. And stared.

"Here it is, Dr Morden."

_Holy mother of God._ His mouth wasn't hanging open, because he'd clenched it shut the moment his brain had started to process what his eyes were seeing.

It was - big.

Not big as in merely 'large', but immense, spanning his entire field of vision. That the vast majority was hidden beneath red rock wasn't relevant; he could _see_ it stretch out into infinity; dark, mottled flesh, pulsing with life and a _presence_ that made his understanding of sentience secondary. This wasn't a piece of alien biotech, he realised suddenly as his stomach roiled; grimly he made an effort and did not vomit. This _was_ an alien.

"What the hell are you doing?!" A body slammed into him, hard, and tackled him to the floor.

He blinked, startled, and looked up into the enraged face of the dig's security chief. "What -?" he gasped out, shifting beneath the man's not-inconsiderable weight. "Get _off_ me!"

"Christ, are you out of your mind? The last person who tried to touch that thing was carted out of here on a stretcher. Is that what you want?"

"I didn't," he started to deny hotly; then, "shit, shit -" because, yes he _had_. He'd been reaching out for it without realising it, hand outstretched to do - something. Something stupid evidently. It had not been gentle or gradual, as one might expect from biologicals overdosing on pheromones, but a sudden head-rush. He'd been hit with the abrupt stomach-clenching urge to _touch_ it, embrace it - to _join_, somehow - that his mind had found fundamentally repugnant. Like human pheromones coming off a spider, maybe. He let his head fall back, his helmet hitting the floor with a 'thunk'. "OK. I get it. There's something odd about it, and I wasn't watching for it. It won't happen again."

The security chief looked at him suspiciously, his face as scrunched up as a bulldog's. "I don't have time to give you a full-time nanny. There are plenty of others here doing things just as stupid that need watching."

Huh. _Interesting._ Morden sighed. "I promise, OK? I'll be careful."

Moving slowly, the chief got off him, then slowly offered him a hand up. Morden let himself be pulled up, surprised at how easily the chief managed his weight. No; Martian gravity was lower than Earth's, that's right. That was why the chief had managed to get him on the floor so quickly. He took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it, toggling the 'record' switch on his pad. "All right. That was interesting. Has anything similar happened before?"

One by one, the rest of the team started to speak.

*

The sessions were turning out to be very productive indeed. His initial physiological response to the probe had faded a little to manageable levels; still not sure what it was doing to his brain chemistry, he made a note to keep an eye on it. With the increased productivity came longer hours; he got into the habit of heading back to the hotel a few hours after sundown, his body clock hopelessly awry. It seemed best to just ride with it, as the Martin day was a scant 37 minutes longer than an Earth one and they tended to add them on just after midnight – an extra half-hour of sleep. Well, who was he to argue?

A few days in, he'd settled well enough. It was almost nice to live out of just one duffel bag, as mornings involved climbing back into his freshly-laundered jumpsuit, catching a bit of the local news with a cup of coffee and something starchy, and then heading out to the dig. His little area in base camp consisted mostly of reference manuals, and all the work he'd been able to salvage from classification from the Ikaara studies. A cramped little desk, a filing cabinet with a busted lock, and a stupid little computer terminal. _Bliss_.

First order of business was to set up parameters and accurately document the recorded message. Well, that was simple enough – they had one useable shot, and one dead guy. He thought about maybe starting off with the Ikaara stuff, but he'd taken that as far as it would go. Besides which, the two languages weren't identical. There were some similarities, to be sure, but there was no point in drawing up the lexicostatistics and then finding out that the link was due to contact between two separate species, rather than stemming from a common proto-language. He didn't think so, but it was more a hunch than anything else. It didn't help that the mediums were so different: the Ikaaran work had been permanently etched into stone monoliths, with some sun and shadow imagery (there hadn't been enough verbs for him to work on the top-lines beyond that, but it had been enough for starters). This brief message had been transient, and seemed to contain mostly verbs. A doing-message, then, but doing _what_? He was also confused over the _draw_ the probe had, in pulling people in so thoroughly. Mental or physiological? He put in a request for the deceased's autopsy report, particularly the brain chemistry analysis. Not that he had much of an understanding of neurochem, but that's why the good Lord invented exec summaries. Frankly, he didn't think that the pull necessarily had much to do with the message being flashed up - rather like body language versus spoken communication - but given that he didn't know what had been 'said', he didn't really have a starting point there either. He puzzled over that one for a while, then decided that he was going about it ass-backwards in trying to draw meanings before setting up the semantic net. And, anyway, it was time for dinner.

He caught the flier back to the hotel. The dig ran a shuttle there and back, but it went a little earlier than he was willing to make use of it and, besides, the flier wasn't that much more expensive. Something was nagging at him as he made his way up the stairs – something he'd forgotten – and it was annoying enough that he considered turning around and heading back to see if he'd locked everything away. _Don't be paranoid_, he decided finally. _It's all done._

Which was fine, until he unlocked the room door was greeted by a shrieking infant and a _very_ angry Denni.

"Oh," he said, realisation sinking in too late. "You're here."

Denni spun around from where she'd been glaring out of the window. She wore heavy travelling clothes to account for the chill on the shuttle over; they must have been a real pain when she'd been waiting for immigration. Plus, Sarah – still buckled into her travel-chair – and all the bags… they'd used a flier, of course, but it must have taken a while. "Yes," Denni hissed, eyes narrowed to slits. She had shadows under her eyes, and her make-up was streaky from the heat. Sarah had been stripped down to her underclothes, but there had been no such option for Denni, who had likely broiled in her travel garb. "We are. And were the fragging hell were _you_?" He winced and opened his mouth to reply but she went on, regardless. "Four hours at the spaceport! Four hours! The immigration officials rang through the entire hotel phonebook trying to get a hold of you – and where were you? Not reachable! I had to get them to ring Aspen's mobile to get my papers approved!"

He winced at that; Aspen wouldn't have been pleased, and would likely let him know it tomorrow. Plus, he was clearly in the wrong. "I'm sorry," he said finally, when she'd ran out of breath. "I completely forgot, and it was incredibly thoughtless of me. I'm sorry."

Denni glared, and snatched up the infant, deftly unbuckling her and placating her with what appeared to be an industrial-size pacifier. Sarah went quiet almost immediately, too surprised by the sudden loss of discomfort to scream about it. "Don't you dare ruin my rant by apologising!"

He hung his head in abject shame. "I'm sorry. You go on ahead."

She threw a cushion at his head.

Smiling – but just a little, because she was still pissed as all hell, and justifiably so – he ducked and quickly stepped forward, pulling her into a hug. "You go on and throw all the things you like, Den," he murmured into her hair. "I really am sorry. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I was at the site, and -" he shrugged helplessly.

She twisted in his arms for a bit, but he was ultimately stronger and, besides, kicking him in the balls wouldn't make her any less tired or irritable. "You need a keeper, is what you need," she sighed finally, and burrowed her face into his shoulder. "You'd forget your head if it wasn't screwed on."

He kissed her hair in response, tightening his hold on her. It's strange, the human capacity to forget. You don't really realise how much you missed someone until they were standing in front of you, angry and sweaty and throwing things at your head. And then, all of a sudden, you're astonished at how you managed to get through the day without them. "I missed you," he said, and, "you smell good."

She wrinkled her nose up at him. "I've been sweating for four hours."

"Yeah, I know." He grinned. "Come on. I'll help you get clean."

She prodded his side, unerringly finding the ticklish spots, but was laughing her acquiescence even before his gasp of surprise.

Then, in the shower, with Sarah safely amazed into quietness by her pacifier, they said 'hello' properly.

*

"I was thinking of waiting a couple of weeks before starting work," Denni said, winding a towel around her wet hair.

Stretched out on the bed, Morden watched her body with considerable interest. "Hmmm?"

She swatted him. "I _said_, I'm going to wait a couple of weeks before working. I've got to work out the logistics of this place – child care, groceries, all the rest of it."

"IPX takes care of that," he said vaguely.

She rolled her eyes and finally gave in, wrapping a towel around her naked body. "OK, you can put your tongue back in now."

He grinned. "Well, I've been surrounded by algorithms and bits of rock for a week. You can't expect me to not notice a naked woman when she's right in front of me." He sobered. "Besides, you don't need to do all that. We're in a hotel, we can get most things sorted here. And IPX can sort out the childcare."

She sat beside him on the bed, nudging him out of the way. "Only an academic would let someone else decide their meals for them," she said, rolling her eyes. "There is such a thing as being _too_ easy-going, you know? And, besides, I need to scope out where I'm going to be working and the rest of it. Maybe take Sarah out for a day-trip – I hear that one of the Tharsis domes has a zoo; might as well get the rest of the admin stuff done then. No point in delegating to someone at IPX who'll probably find an enormous nanny to live with us instead of a nice day-care centre."

"I don't think that Mars has live-in nannies," Morden said, _sotto voce_.

Denni harrumphed and set off on the search for underwear. "Tell me about the dig," she called back from the other room. "Is it anything like Aspen said?"

"It's better. It's – Christ, Den, it nearly blew the top of my head off. Remember how I was throwing fits over the Ikaara glyphs?"

"No verbs."

"Exactly. Well, here, best that I can figure it, I've been given nothing _but_ verbs, all lumped together."

She stuck her head around the door. "It sounds Germanic."

He made a face. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response."

She grinned, and went back to searching. "All right, you've got your verbs. Sounds good."

"It is. And we've got quite a bit of access – Biotech are heavily involved, of course, but linguistics is quite important, too. I've got a desk and everything."

"Stop it, you're making me jealous."

"Mock all you want, you horrible own-office-with-her-name-on-the-door person."

She emerged from the other room, dressed in a pair of simple black slacks and a deep blue sweater. "Hey, I can't help it if my skills are in demand." She patted his knee. "Poor academia-bound baby."

"Yeah, yeah."

Laughing, "all right, I won't mock. I'm glad that it's going well, honestly. I remember how frustrated you were about the Ikaara gig."

He frowned a little. "Yeah. And it really is. Only –"

"Only -?"

"Well, it's stupid. Psi Corps's got a facility somewhere near the dig – we're not exactly sure where, but it's within the blast radius of the site. And they've been throwing fits that we're using explosives to dig."

"I can see their point. One crack in the dome and they're all history."

Slowly, "well, that's just it. It's low-level stuff, the sort of things you can use inside a dome, almost. The Syria Planum UA rep is fine with us blasting away, and by the guidance Psi Corps gave us, we're closer to the SP dome than to the Psi Corps one." It didn't make any sense to kick up such a fuss over nothing, and Psi Corps was nothing if coldly rational. The lack of reason - a _known_ reason, anyway - bugged him considerably.

Denni shrugged fluidly. "Maybe the Psi Corps dome isn't as robust as this one. Or maybe the maps were a bit exaggerated. It _is_ a military facility, after all."

"Maybe."

She frowned at his expression and poked him in the ribs. "Okay, that's enough worrying. Up, up, you're taking me to dinner."

Startled, "now?"

"Well, it is dinner time! And some of us have only had shuttle food for the entire day!"

That was fair enough. Besides, good food always made Denni more than a little bit sociable, and their earlier tryst had barely taken the edge off. He grinned. "What the hell."

*


	6. Chapter 6

VI.

A couple of days later, he had the suite to himself again, with Denni and Sarah off on their little trip. He decided to use up all of his week's water allowance in one extravagant go and take a bath. No point in not taking advantage of his non-residential status, after all, and it might help him think. Back on Earth, he'd used to sit in Denni's hot tub for hours on end, reading and rewriting de Saussure (his professors would have been horrified), and turning into a prune. _Ah, student life_, he thought with no small amount of irony.

The bathwater was somewhat murky, but he dumped a handful of Denni's bath salts into it, so at least it looked like _welcoming_ murkiness. He threw his clothes into the laundry chute, wondered briefly if he'd left his cards in his back pocket and would have to run down to the basement to rescue them before the whole lot was cleaned, then discovered them in his bag and felt rather silly. Bath it was, then, to soak some of that frustration away. He'd been all over the place lately, and it had nothing to do with the dry heat. He'd acclimatised to the recycled air finally, and his body had decided that it was permissible to sleep through the night. Sarah didn't agree, though, and even when she'd tired herself out, he was too wired to drift off.

He fiddled with the clasp of the chain around his neck, annoyed that it couldn't cooperate, and then gave up. Well, a bath likely wouldn't destroy it, he reasoned, and left it on. He stretched; popping joints, and sank down into the tub. Eyes closed, head back: the typical 'I'm going to relax if it kills me' position.

The problem was, he wasn't looking at an inscription, or a parchment, or anything of the sort. The alien – he'd started thinking of it as alive, if not necessarily sentient – had flashed the message, and then fallen silent. It could have been Kirkish's damn fool fault for letting someone touch it, and it got spooked, or maybe hurt, somehow. The guard had been carted off kicking and screaming, and had died shortly after of a cerebral haemorrhage – what did that mean, then? Kirkish was going on about neural tech, but that was her area, so of course she would be. He was quite happy to let her get on with it, if only she could get the thing talking again. _There's too small an area uncovered,_ he thought. _It tried talking to us, and it got stung. Even if it's just a piece of biotech and is nothing more than a computerised probe, sticking a pin in its side's going to send up some sparks._

On a purely selfish level, his work was stalling. The probe could have been flashing a recipe for Cajun chicken or revealing the secrets of the universe, and he still wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Strange that it'd flash a message at all, though. Most things tended towards inertia.

He dozed for a while, letting the ideas percolate. By the time the water ran cool, things had started to figure themselves out. _I wouldn't flash a welcome message then zap whoever came in,_ he thought. _But maybe they would. No, that makes no sense – no point in sending something lethal out there if you're aiming to make peaceful contact. And the thing's been buried for centuries, so its purpose may have been corrupted._ This was getting him nowhere. He dried off slowly. _Look at it another way: what makes logical sense?_ A message is sent, contact established, and a man is dead.

He stilled. _Fragging hell._ He keyed the comm. unit – voice only, out of deference for propriety – and called up Aspen. "Richard?"

"Morden, I'm a bit busy right now –"

"Yeah, drop it all, this is important."

Indignation over the line. Aspen sure liked his little kingdoms. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the probe, what else? I figured out why it tried to communicate – god, I'm an idiot, I can't believe it didn't register before!"

"All right, you're gonna make sense soon, yeah?"

He growled, impatient. "The first message was a warning: do not touch. We didn't listen, and we got zapped for our trouble. I'm not sure if that message was conscious. But - I think it was like – like a bee sting, you see? We buzzed, and got slapped down. Reflex - a hardwired response, not an actual attempt at communication."

Aspen's voice grew tinny with annoyance. "Are you trying to tell me that it's not going to talk again?"

"I don't think it was 'talking' the first time! More like - a hazard warning sign on automatic." He paused. Well, they wouldn't know unless they tried, right? "I think I can get it to talk. But I'm going to need to get its attention. We're gonna need to dig it out. All of it." Pure speculation - but it couldn't hurt. Besides which, he _wanted_ it free, even if he wasn't entirely sure _why_.

There was another possibility, of course – that the probe was brain-dead, and that contact _wasn't_ possible. Only, he didn't think that saying it would go over too well.

Silence. Laughing, then, "yeah, in a month of Sundays!"

Well, hell. "I think I can persuade the U.A. head to fund it."

"Holtz? I don't think that NewTech'll fund it, not with Psi Corps breathing down our necks, and you think that Holtz is going to go head to head with the rest of the councilmen to fund this excavation project?"

Morden thought this over, worrying the towel between his fingers. Nothing wrong with a bit of confidence, was there? At least, that's what Denni said. And he had one hell of an incentive to pull a rabbit out of the hat. "Yeah," he said finally. "Yeah, I do."

Aspen huffed at him for a while after that, but asking wouldn't hurt. And he surely knew that Morden would have a better chance – however miniscule it might have been – of getting that funding if the team were united. "Fine," he said. "Fine. Come to my office tomorrow. I'll ring Mary, we'll talk strategy."

Good. He gave a time, and rang off. And realised that he was freezing his ass off.

Clothes, then. And possibly sleep.

*

_He was on a high cliff, looking down. It was red; he remembers this much. He could hear screaming from above, and thought that maybe it was the desert birds. No; that can't be right. He's not in Arizona anymore; this is Martian red, and when he looks down from the edge of the cliff, he sees people in EVA suits scurrying back and forth, like ants. The screams above him strengthen, circling above, high-pitched and full-throated until, at last, he yields and looks up, and_ wakes up.

He blinked disoriented. He wasn't sure what he'd been dreaming about, the dream scuttling back in the depths of his mind as he tried to reach for it. Judging by the state of his nightclothes, though, it had been a good dream - or on its way there, at any rate. He cursed a little and then rolled over, the pillow over his head.

*

The next morning, he slept in. No early start at the site meant luxuriating in bed for another half hour or so. It was still a little cold, though – the recyc was maybe working overtime? Or he'd become used to the heat underground. Anyway. He snagged an extra blanket and crept back under the covers for those few extra minutes.

Halfway through breakfast, Denni called.

"Hello, stranger." The connection was a little fuzzy.

"Hey, you! How's the dig?"

"Good, it's good." Briefly, he filled her in on what he'd decided.

Denni frowned at him. "That makes sense. From a human standpoint, anyway. I wouldn't know about an alien one."

"Neither would I!" And that was the problem. "How're you? How's Sarah?"

"Talking!" Denni grinned, showing teeth. "Sort of. She does love the zoo, though. I couldn't tear her away from the baby duckies. She demanded a picture."

He rolled his eyes. "Me a linguist and you an engineer, and we manage to produce a flighty arty type."

"Well, the milkman was always very creative," Denni assured him solemnly. She ruffled her hair, settling it back into a more natural position.

"Haircut?" He hazarded.

Ruefully, "is it that bad?"

"No, it's great. New." He hadn't noticed until she'd moved, but she'd lost a good three inches off the bottom. God. Focus! He'd managed to end up talking to himself the other day; completely oblivious that the systems tech had walked off. A minute or two was understandable, but she'd gone off a good half hour previous! It would have been funny, maybe, if it wasn't ever so slightly worrying. It was a wonder that Aspen wasn't having him committed, frankly. He changed the subject. "When are you back?"

"Five or so hours. We set off in a bit, but I'm building in the obligatory toilet trips."

"We shoulda kept her in nappies," he muttered.

Denni smiled back. "Be good. I'll call when we get into the dome. Love you."

"Love you too. Kiss Sarah for me."

He signed off; thought about maybe reading the paper. No, he was too wired up already. He'd been wired up a lot lately: something in the food, maybe? Or this dig was just too important to mess up, and his body knew it. Well, he'd have to think of a way to unwind, because this level of wakefulness was doing him no favours. He could catch the shuttle or a flier to the main lab, but he had a good free hour yet. So why not walk?

The route to the lab was a bit more complicated on foot than by flier. For one thing, he didn't fancy going across the local park - what was essentially a subterranean field, with lights above to fool the plants into photosynthesising – so he had to walk 'round. He picked up a coffee on the way though, and tried to structure his thoughts. Aspen might be on board in theory, but he wasn't too sure how much of his own personal stock he'd be willing to put on the line. Plan for doing it alone, and be glad of the extra help, rather than be let down mid-negotiation. Besides, Kirkish might be against the idea – it sure wouldn't make NewTech happy, and they were her meal ticket. Well, for all of them, sure, but Kirkish more than most.

He reached the lab in good time. He hadn't visited that much before, preferring a couple of pads and a quiet desk somewhere near the site rather than a central office, but it was a nice enough building. It had escaped the Martian obsession with sandstone, and was instead a handsome redbrick, more like a university than a government site. Inside, Morden was waved through somewhat lax security, and sat down in a perfectly ordinary office, complete with potted plant.

"I've had a hell of a time selling this pitch to the others, Morden," Aspen started, entering the room a couple of minutes later and trying to juggle a stack and several pads sat atop it. Kirkish was on his heels, still in her customary blue jumpsuit.

"We don't need the team's approval," Morden said mildly. "Just their acceptance."

Aspen gave him an odd look. "Yeah, and that would have gone over _real_ well!" Aspen dumped the lot on his desk and took a seat, Kirkish by his side. "Well, you've got Mary convinced at any rate, so I suppose that it isn't a totally stupid idea."

That was unexpected. Biotechs liked their security, as a general rule. Maybe he wasn't the only one losing his head over this. "You'd back a civilian excavation?"

She grinned and ran a hand through her hair. "I'd back a _Narn_ excavation if it'll get that thing loose. It's no use to us sitting under half a ton of rock, and EarthGov's dragging its heels. I don't see why we shouldn't take a little initiative."

*

Denni called a little while later to let him know that she'd arrived.

"Can't talk, am stressing."

She laughed. "All right. We're back safe. We'll see you later. Love you."

"Love you too."

And back to the proposal. The problem was, there wasn't a single reason on God's green earth that Holtz should agree to funding the excavation. He had Psi Corps breathing down his neck, EarthGov pinching the purse strings, and a residential build on hold. So where was the upside?

Well, he was getting nowhere staring at the computer screen. He got himself a coffee and caught the early shuttle back to the dome. Nothing like a spot of recycled air to get the old grey matter moving.

*

Holtz met him in a little office near the Grand Chamber he'd seen on the council recording. They didn't bother with the tour, as the Councillor didn't have the time, and evidently Morden wasn't worth impressing or intimidating. Instead, Holtz sat back in his plush leather chair, and gave the impression of a man much put-upon. Morden would have to start the conversation. Well, fine.

How to do it, thought? Make it _their_ problem, his daddy had always said. Make it so you're doing _them_ a favour. Well, it had worked on more than one administrator back on earth. And what's good enough for EarthGov bureaucrats… "You have a problem, Mr Holtz," he said.

Holtz raised an eyebrow. "Indeed? How so?"

"This dig is important. Every government department from here to Proxima 7 is salivating at getting a slice of what we're uncovering."

"I had noticed a certain amount of interest," Holtz admitted.

"That's precisely the problem. EarthGov doesn't want off-world fingers in what they see as _their_ pie. So they'll stall, like they always do, until a few local crises spring up, and they can send in the black ops teams to mop up the area."

"I think you're exaggerating."

"Not at all," Morden said implacably. He smiled, and folded his hands cross one knee. "I have an interest in staying with this project, but I was reluctant to commit to it because of precisely this level of interference. I can always cut and run – move on to something a little less 'interesting'." He drawled the word out, working the syllables as though they made up something deeply unpleasant. "You don't have this luxury."

Holtz frowned. "So we'll wait it out," he said, but he sounded a little uncertain.

Morden smiled. "Of course you will. It shouldn't take more than a decade or two for the politics to be resolved –" his smile faded a little, as if something had just occurred to him. The initial discussion with the rest of the reps had said ten years, at most, not twenty. At twenty, Mars would be unliveable, given the current conditions. "You can hold on without expansion for a couple of decades, right?" he looked at Holtz innocently.

Holtz said nothing.

Morden's smile returned. "Look, Mr Holtz, I'm here because I want to help. I'm interested in this dig, and I don't want to have to find something too boring for EarthGov to notice."

"What precisely are you proposing, Mr Morden?"

His expression was the epitome of innocence. "I'm not proposing anything, Councilman! I'm simply here to offer my support. I can understand that EarthGov are difficult to deal with, but that's where IPX come in. The NewTech division is strong, and this team is the strongest of the lot. We should be able to smooth things over back on Earth, should you and your associates come up with an –" how to phrase it? "- _unorthodox_ solution to this current problem." He spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "That's all."

Holtz glowered at him for a while, but remained silent. The man wasn't a fool. Morden knew that Holtz had more than an idea of what NewTech was asking, but couldn't come right out and _say_. Still, it was a good argument. He hadn't come out and threatened Mars with ruin, but he'd certainly made sure that the population issue was plain in Holtz's mind. If this didn't work... he could feel a thin trickle of sweat make its way down the small of his back as he waited, smile fixed.

Eventually, Holtz sighed. "I'll have to discuss it with the others. It's a big job. It'll take a bit of work to raise the funds – and that's not even considering Psi Corps's issues with it."

"NewTech can handle Psi Corps," Morden said confidently.

Holtz looked at him. "I'm sure. You can be a very persuasive man, Mr Morden."

That was the polite dismissal. "Part and parcel of the job spec," he said easily, and stood. "You'll let me know what you and your associates decide?"

"You'll be the first to know."

Well.

It wasn't until he was all the way outside that the last of the adrenaline hit, and his knees felt weak. _Adrenaline overdose,_ he thought faintly, grabbing at the talisman around his neck and willing himself to calm down. _Too much stress, all at once._ He bought a bottle of orange juice and nervously gulped the lot down. _Fragging hell._ It had worked, though. Goddamn it, it had worked! He ducked into a public phone box and placed a quick call to the main lab.

"Yeah?"

"All done," he said brusquely.

Aspen hesitated, dubious and hopeful all at once. "You mean –"

"He'll talk to the others about the logistics, but he's on board."

Even someone as stolid as Aspen couldn't resist a whoop at that.

*

Still nervous and high from the rush, he walked back to the hotel, trying to work off some of the nervous energy. It worked a little better than expected – by the time he got back to the hotel, he was dead on his feet. Denni and Sarah were out, but it was still daylight outside, so it was none of his business. He thought about a shower, then nixed the idea. Tomorrow, maybe, when he wasn't ready to have a heart attack from nerves. He stripped, then crawled into bed naked.

He was almost asleep when the light went on; the sun must have set as he dozed, and he hadn't even noticed. "Ooops!" And off it went again.

He blinked fuzzily. "Den?"

"Sorry, love, didn't mean to wake you. Lemme put Sarah to bed."

He sat up at that. "No, wait, give her here for a bit."

Denni slid under the covers next to him fully clothed, only toeing off her boots along the way. Sarah crawled happily across the top of the duvet, heading unerringly for her daddy's outstretched arms. "It's like radar," Denni said, smiling.

He cuddled the little girl, kissing her hair and stroking her face. "I missed you lots. Did you miss daddy?"

She cooed up at him and wrapped her arms around his neck. "Daddy," she proclaimed with unending satisfaction. She only had a few words as yet, but those she knew she used clearly and with confidence.

He laughed. "That's right. Guess what daddy did today?"

"What did daddy do today?" Denni inquired, cuddling up to him.

He stretched out, so he could hug them both. "Daddy was very, very persuasive."

"Well, I've known that for years," Denni said coyly, and trailed a finger down his chest. "It's not like I said 'yes' for your looks, is it?"

Laughing, "get this little one off to bed, would you? I wanna tell you all about it."

"Bed," Sarah said with considerable conviction, and waved her little arms around.

Denni caught her and hoisted her up obligingly. "You stay right there, Mr Persuasion," she said, smiling. "I'll be right back."

By the time she was, he was mostly awake. "Wanna tell me all about your silver tongue?" She whispered, sliding out of her clothes and crawling under the bedcovers.

He caught her and tumbled her beneath him. "Later," he murmured into her ear. "First, I wanna show you what else I can do with it."

And, giggling, she let him.

They both dozed, after, basking in the fading post-coital warmth. Denni had one dark arm thrown across Morden's chest, and her face buried in his neck. She'd tucked her feet against one of his calves for warmth, and the toes would periodically clench and unclench in her sleep, tickling him a little.

In his sleep, he saw the alien craft – not a probe, but something larger, something _grander_ – and the writing across it. This time, it wasn't just confined to a small area, but all across the black, glossy surface, in characters as large as a man. They spooled across the ship's surface, curling around each other like swimmers underwater. He knew what the smaller, rock-carved glyphs said, and tried to find the familiar words in these pools of ink, but they would not stay still for long enough. Instead, they coiled and uncoiled; black nests of snakes filling his vision, twisting away as he tried to grab for them. _Stay!_ he begged them. _Stay! Talk to me!_ They laughed, and danced out of reach.

He woke to the sound of his heart racing, thunderous, blinking black spots from his vision, as though he had been staring at the light for too long.

*

One of Kirkish's techs called him a few days later to say that Biotech was going in that afternoon to see what the initial blasts would uncover; would he be interested? Hell, yes! He kissed Sarah's pointy little nose on his way out; Denni was interviewing sitters that day, so that would keep them both occupied for the duration.

He got there a little after three, and found Kirkish and the rest of them already suited up and about to go beneath ground. "Gimme a minute; I'll come down with you." He changed hurriedly, and after checking to make sure that his pad was recording everything, followed the Biotech team down the shaft.

"Initial scans are showing an increase in radiation," Kirkish's deputy said; Morden couldn't remember his name.

Kirkish frowned. "How high?"

"Nothing approaching dangerous, but it's still a three-fold increase from before the blasts."

That was interesting. Faint traces of radiation had indeed been picked up by the scans, and Morden - like the rest of them - had attributed it to the craft's long journey; maybe to some of the internal mechanisms still working away on the inside. They had anticipated that the radiation would increase as they excavated more of the craft - simple logic indicated that the rock had been blocking most of it from the scanners - but that it wouldn't reach dangerous levels. Kirkish had speculated that maybe this was what had killed the guard - that if it was not a result of interstellar irradiation, but was, rather, internally generated, then the craft's skin was possibly keeping most of it in. Touching the craft had thus funnelled a lethal dose into the hapless guard.

Morden thought it was a good theory, although he did think that something was missing from it. A lethal dose of radiation would indeed kill swiftly, but the guard hadn't shown any physiological signs of radiation poisoning, other than degradation in his neural pathways. He was in no way an expert in radiation therapy, but he rather thought that if radiation had caused the cerebral haemorrhage, it would have shown up elsewhere on the body as well. Holtz had finally sent through the autopsy results and there had been, quite simply, nothing physically wrong with Stephen Johnson, deceased.

"Keep an eye on it, and yell if there's any abrupt change," Kirkish advised, and palmed the safety on the final door. The first and most impregnable safety precaution that had been fitted had been the blast-proof door at the bottom of the shaft. It was far enough down to keep any underground blast contained, and far enough away from the craft that any dynamite-led excavation wouldn't damage its moorings.

Beyond the safety door was the catwalk: a thin-strutted, metal construction that wove, single-file, to an observation platform near the exposed face of the craft. There was just enough space for them all on the platform if they got _real_ friendly. Kirkish was muttering notes into her recorder about having a secondary level built, now that a larger part of the craft was exposed; the rest of the biotechs were busy scanning for their lives. Morden was just - looking.

_Well, now,_ he thought, and somehow couldn't think of anything else. _Well._ The exposed face of the craft stretched upwards, like an animal skin suspended for tanning. Deep beneath the Martian surface the red tint pervading the atmosphere was lacking, with the artificial lamps glowing a familiar white-gold, casting a greenish tint across the mottled curves. _Oh,_ Morden thought helplessly. He felt the now-familiar tug pool hotly in his belly, stronger than before. _Oh…_

*

He was a little startled when Kirkish touched his arm a few moments later. "Time to go," she said brusquely, and turned to direct the securing of the site. He blinked. _Time to go?_ But they'd only just arrived! Only - no, his chrono told him a good few hours had passed, and techs were giving him funny looks. Well, shit, if he'd zoned out in front of it, no wonder. He packed up, and was quick about it. Interesting, this - was it another manifestation of the probe's 'pull'? Meriting further study, in any case.

On his way back to the hotel, he passed the main clinic almost without seeing it; stopped and reconsidered. He'd always been a skittish, light sleeper and prone to nightmares (as his recent dreams had so urgently decided to remind him), and although he was not a real fan of chemicals in his system, there was no point in turning in a poor performance. Besides, Denni had thought ahead and registered all three of them at the local doctor's surgery. He was grateful for her practicality but, then, she _was_ an engineer. He called in and got an appointment with a minimum wait.

"What can I do for you, Mr Morden?" The doctor said, much in the way of doctor's everywhere. She had the easy grace of native-born Martians: those having grown up with the slightly lighter gravity. Morden rather thought that the faint difference would iron itself out eventually, as it moved to the anatomical rather than motile level. A little bit of extra height, with thinner bones, and give them a few millennia, Martians would move much the same way as the Earth-born. They wouldn't look the same, of course, but that was beside the point. Who did?

He outlined his need to the doctor, not scrimping on the details. There was nothing worse than being medicated by someone without a complete medical history. She was a pleasant surprise to the usual level of bureaucracy he had found on Mars, assessing him as fit and healthy and prescribing him two lots of sleeping pills: "one to help you sleep, and one to combat your nightmares." He'd all but lunged at the second one, which had been a mistake. What had followed had been a twenty-minute lecture explaining the function of the dreamless sleep pills down to the most irrelevant minutiae. Doctor Valeris, however, evidently felt very strongly about their misuse. "I'm sure you're aware that one of the misues of these types of meds is as a torture device. In these doses, of course, they are perfectly harmless, but increasing the dosage without medical supervision is _incredibly_ dangerous." She talked about REM sleep, and recharging your brain, and all the rest of it, until he couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Thank you, doctor, but I have taken these drugs before, I _am_ aware of the risks, _and_ of the experiments you cited. I'm not about to start dosing myself with lethal doses of REM-suppressant drugs. I just need the option for one-offs."

She nodded, and made a great many notes. Most patients weren't trusted with REM-suppressants, as they had been deemed a little too dangerous for casual use. Most patients, Morden surmised, were idiots: who didn't know what REM-deprivation did to the body - and, for that matter, to the mind? Even at his most desperate as a teenager, when passing his exams seemed the most important thing in his entire life, he had never once abused his dosage. Take five pills a month and have a few guaranteed nights of dreamless sleep; take more than five, and you'd become irritable. Take more than ten, and you'd become downright cranky. Take more than that - well. Paranoia, uncontrollable itching and liver failure would be the least of your problems.

He picked up his pills from the pharmacy, filling in ten million more forms indicating that he understood the correct usage of these drugs and wouldn't sue anyone if he managed to kill himself with them. Did he want to charge things to the main account? He hesitated on that, reluctant to go ten rounds with Denni over chemical dependency and the rest of it. She had very firm and increasingly outspoken views on that, and they didn't necessarily match up with his own beliefs. Well, frag it; he was a big boy now. He paid in cash and caught the flier back home. Denni was out, still, but he was shattered, and so he thought - well. They were there, weren't they?

He took a pill - one of the normal ones - had a cup of hot broth, and went to bed.

*

He slept poorly, torn between the need to stay asleep and the nightmare's insistence that he wake. When he did finally struggle to wakefulness at some point in the morning, it was to Denni's hand on his belly, making tiny circles. He couldn't remember his dreams, but they had evidently not been pleasant; the bedclothes were soaked with his sweat. Or maybe they were, because that wasn't the only fluid there. As he frowned, discomforted, Denni tugged a little impatiently on his waistband.

"Hey, you. Looks like you had a good sleep." Her mouth quirked into a smile. "Want to go into the shower and soap my back? I'll soap yours..." She tickled the soft skin of his belly, her smile low and inviting.

He would have. He really would. But - "I'm just - I've got a bit of a headache, Den. Can we raincheck?"

Without waiting for a response, he slid out of bed and headed for the shower. Alone.

*

Back at the dig, he thought that he'd probably been a bit brusque. _Well, nothing I can fix now,_ he thought; then it occurred to him that, actually, there was. He sent Denni a text comm. direct to her phone: _sorry about this am. make it up to u tonite? xx, m._ Her reply was equally succinct - _youd better! im buying maple syrup... d._ So that was all right. Although it would cost them a week's water allowance afterwards... well, what the hell, the sonics took away the dirt and sweat, but he still couldn't convince himself that excessive usage didn't leave him smelling like a Pak'ma'ra.

He laughed a little - and stopped. He called in to Kirkish's office. "D'you have a minute?"

She was frowning over the latest radiation stats, but waved him in. "Sure. What can I do for you?"

"I had a thought." She wasn't paying attention. He flopped down in the armchair in front of her desk and leaned forward, hands on the wood. "Kirkish. I've had a thought about making contact with the ship -"

She gave him a pained look. "You're not still talking about it as if it's alive, are you?"

"Alive, yes, sentient - I have no idea. But you don't have to be sentient to be capable of communication; even ants communicate."

"Your point?"

"We're trying to communicate with it, and we've been working on the assumption that it doesn't want to communicate with us, or that it doesn't understand what we're saying. But there's a third option." He took a deep breath. "Before we came up with language, before we came up with signs and symbols and the rest of it, we still communicated through grunts and body language. But I think that this ship is one step beyond that. It's alien. We know that. But I don't think that we've considered _how_ alien it is as yet - or, not that it doesn't _want_ to communicate with us, but that it doesn't recognise what we're doing _as_ communication!"

Kirkish frowned. "I - don't follow."

He stood up restlessly, pacing. "It suddenly occurred to me - I was thinking about the Pak'ma'ra and - well, did you read about First Contact?" She shook her head silently. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. The important bits are that we nearly ended up at war with the Pak'ma'ra, because all of the species we'd met until then primarily used sound and movement to communicate - speech, and body language. A few used telepathy, but even they opted for visual and aural representations of signs and concepts. The Pak'ma'ra, however, used sound _and smell_."

Her mouth hung open. "You're _kidding_ me."

"Not at all. We knew that their smell was unpleasant, and we knew that it occasionally varied, but it wasn't until one of the other races - the Drazi, maybe, I forget exactly - intervened that we were able to figure out that we were only hearing half of what the Pak'ma'ra were 'saying'. And that they, conversely, had been 'listening' to cologne and perfume."

Kirkish made a face. "I'm not sure I buy it. Smell as communication -"

"Earth insects use it all the time," he countered instantly. "Anyway, I'm not here to talk about smell," _especially when I'm right!_ "but about the, the _semantic_ miscommunication there - the Pak'ma'ra thought they were communicating, but we had no idea that what we were receiving was communication."

Kirkish drummed her fingers on her desk. At least she had put her charts to one side and was giving him her undivided attention. "All right," she said slowly. "Let's assume you're right and there's something we're missing. You want that piece of junk to talk to you, and so do I. But why bring this to me?"

He tilted his face and aimed for innocence. "Because I need you on my side when I bring it to Aspen, of course."

"Bring _what_ to Aspen?"

He was having a hard time keeping a straight face. "Why, bringing in a Psi Corps-certified telepath, of course."

To say that Kirkish hit the roof was a mild understatement. Evidently, Psi Corps were responsible for the subjugation of all humankind - or would be, if given half the chance - and were bossy, invariably British, and wore most displeasing uniforms. There were probably other things wrong with them as well, but Morden simply nodded through the tirade, waiting it out. Eventually, Kirkish sighed, defeated. "Oh, you know I have to agree," she bit out. "Go see Aspen. The sooner the fragging Corps rep is in here, the sooner we can kick his jack-booted ass right out again."

*

And things went exactly in that fashion, except for the part where the Psi Corps declined their request for a telepath.

"What do you _mean_, they said 'no'? _Why_?!" Morden demanded.

Aspen was inscrutable. "I guess they just don't like you, Morden. I can't imagine why." He sobered. "Look. They said that they don't want their people exposed to whatever is down there and, frankly, I don't blame them. Given how you and Kirkish have been acting, you'd think that you've been snorting caffeine in your spare time." Morden had no idea what he meant, and said so. Aspen rolled his eyes. "Come on - pushing the deadlines forward? That business with Holtz and the civilian dig? Promising that I can keep _Psi Corps_ in line? It's not like you at all. And Kirkish appears to have set up a bed in base camp." He snorted. "You'd think that she doesn't have a place to stay in the dome." And so on and so forth, with Morden only half-listening. _A bed at base camp wouldn't be a bad idea given the workload,_ he thought. He rang off as soon as was polite and retreated back to his desk at base camp, fuming.

Well, that settled one thing: telepathic communication was _definitely_ the way forward. Or, well, whatever he'd be able to approximate. _And no wonder that guard went mad_, he thought; close on its heels came, _I wonder what would happen if we made a telepath touch it..._

TBC…


	7. Chapter 7

VII.

He was put through to a blank-faced psi cop over at the Psi Corps HQ inside the main dome; his request to be put through to the facility near base camp met with silence. Well, fair enough, it was supposed to be secret after all. Although, given how 'secret' such secrets remained in an enclosed community such as base camp - in other words, not at all - he thought that there was little point in giving him this run-around. In any case, the psi cop was as uncooperative as the four other reps he'd been put through to previously.

"I'm afraid that we're going to have to deny your request, Mr Morden," she said. If she'd had even a flicker of a reaction in her eyes she would have been quite attractive; as it was she reminded Morden of one of those beautiful little snakes found on Earth. They were so exquisitely formed, with such astoundingly beautiful jewel-like colours - and they were also some of the most poisonous creatures Earth had ever produced.

He shifted tactics, moving from 'charming' to 'logical'. "Look, Ms Kelsey, I understand you're worried about your people being affected by the ship. But I'm not asking for long-term contact, or to have a telepath _touch_ it. I'm simply asking for someone low-level - a P3, perhaps - who could establish a line of base-level communication. Surely _looking_ at it couldn't do any harm."

Kelsey frowned. "_Looking_ at something can do a _great deal_ of harm to a telepath, Mr Morden. I am afraid that it is not Psi Corps policy to endanger our people for your convenience. We are in favour of shutting down this entire project, for health and safety reasons, and see no reason to increase its scope at our expense. Good day." And, with that, she cut the circuit.

_Damn!_ He braced his fists against the comm. console and scowled. _Goddamn it._ He couldn't even bring himself to be truly angry. Sure, he'd been furious at the first refusal, and had insisted that Aspen try again - and again - and again. Eventually, even Aspen's famed patience failed him, and he'd snapped that if Morden wanted to bother the Corps so badly, he should do it himself. So that was just what Morden did: every day for the past two weeks. He'd put everything else on hold, slotting his personal life on the 'backlog' pile for catching up on when he had a moment. It was crap, and happening more often than was probably healthy, but there was little he could do about it. Dealing with Psi Corps, it quickly became evident, was _hard_. For the first week and a half, he had not been put through to anyone. Evidently, you had to _work_ to be granted access to anyone of any stature within the Corps; either that, or the receptionist had finally been worn down by his persistence. _Whatever works._ At any rate, his efforts had not managed to accomplish much in the way of cooperation; indeed, he was a little worried that he'd managed to sic Psi Corps's entire senior division on his case. He stretched, popping joints. Well, not much he could do about it now.

He closed down the secure terminal, and took the stairs down. He'd had to trek into the main research lab inside the dome, because evidently the base camp comm. systems wouldn't let him call Psi Corps headquarters. Either that or - more likely - Psi Corps wouldn't accept calls outside of the pre-secured terminals inside the domes and Earth-side. At any rate, he was inside the dome, which was helpful in terms of his journey home, as it was already past 10 pm. Come to think of it, that was possibly partly why Ms Kelsey had seemed so thoroughly pissed off. Still, he hadn't been about to waste valuable time travelling to and from base camp and the dome, so all the admin _had_ to be pushed until the evening. Denni had been complaining that he'd been skipping meals and heading out earlier and earlier each morning, but what was he supposed to do? Work was stalling and that was simply unacceptable.

He made it home in good time, but Denni was already in bed and out like a light, by the looks of it. There were a host of missed messages from her on his phone, but he hadn't had a chance to check them - well, everything looked fine, so it couldn't have been that important. He stripped off his clothing and crawled under the covers naked, shivering at the cool blast of air, and found himself too wired up to drift off. He contemplated taking a pill, but decided against it. He'd had a couple of the REM-less pills for two nights running, his dreams growing downright worrisome over his concern for the dig, and he doubted that another night of dreamlessness would help: he'd just be putting off the inevitable. Instead, he counted sheep.

*

He wasn't aware of when he drifted off, only that the sheep were an odd colour. Well, it was night time, so perhaps it was only natural that their wool should be dark, like little puffs of blackened cloud against the soft glow of the stars. _I'm dreaming,_ he thought, startled when something touched him. He turned - where was he? A field of some kind, with the twisted corpses of trees, and birds pecking listlessly at the ground - searching, searching. It was cold - was there a wind? - and there was no one behind him; no one at all, plucking at his sleeve.

_Hello,_ said No One, and He wore his face like a mask. His eyes were black, through irises and 'whites', more holes than human eyes of any sort.

_Who are you?_ he asked.

No One touched his hand; his arm. No One's fingers touched his chest; the black stone hummed in satisfaction. _I'm No One,_ he said, smiling. _Aren't you?_ His touch dipped lower.

*

He woke, furious and terrified and trembling, fluid across his thighs. He wiped himself off with his nightclothes as best he could, and threw them into the laundry hamper. _God,_ he thought, shaking. _My good God._

He took a REM-less pill; swallowed it dry.

*

Six a.m.: back on Earth, the birds would have been singing for hours. He rolled out of bed and headed for the shower, careful not to wake the sleeping Denni. He had spent half the night in blissfully dreamless sleep; in the cold, hard light of day, even the first half looked a lot better. _It's perfectly natural,_ he decided as he started up the sonics. _Just variation on an anxiety dream. There's probably a stack of texts I could access that would be more than happy to tell me that I have a fear of abandonment and poor performance appraisals._ He stepped out; took his time selecting clothes. He had a meeting with Aspen - something to do with the Councillors, he'd been told - so he should probably skip the jumpsuit. But - black slacks and a blue sweater - yes, that would do nicely.

Soft snuffling noises from the next room told him that Sarah was probably awake. He felt a brief stab of guilt - he hadn't really been around as much as he would have liked to. True, the project was all-consuming and he had always had a tendency to throw himself into his work, but he'd managed to see her a little more back when she'd been an infant and he'd been transcribing Ikaaran glyphs all night. Here, he had all the staff he could want - except that he didn't want any - and things were moving on his schedule. _No reason not to make more of an effort,_ he thought, and tried to rid himself of the feeling that he was forgetting something important. Denni had been wired as hell lately; maybe she had a new project starting and it was rubbing off? Except that he couldn't remember her last project finishing… Well, hell. He tiptoed into the nursery and plucked the still-dozing child from her crib. "Hey, you," he murmured into the soft hair, inhaling baby-scent: talc and sweetness. "How about a kiss for Daddy?"

She snuffled a little. "Go 'way, sleeping," and she reached out for her teddy bear. OK, then. Possibly a little _too_ early - well, he couldn't do much about it. "I'll see you later, honey. Daddy loves you."

He carefully put her back down, and got the rest of his stuff together. He had an early meeting to get to.

It wasn't until he stopped in to the kitchen for a bite to eat on his way to work that he saw the slice of cake pinning the note on the counter. A burnt-out candle was sticking out of bright pink "_3!_" scrawled on the icing.

*

Things progressed as expected for a few weeks, and mainly consisted of him waiting for the other shoe to drop. Denni hadn't precisely forgiven him for missing Sarah's birthday, but her overt hostility had cooled into a frosty silence. Sarah forgot a little quicker, but she'd reached a point of such high energy that he was tired just _looking_ at her, and he guiltily found himself preferring Denni's silence. At least with that, he could get some work done. He'd stuck his neck out, possibly for the first time in his life, and he had Holtz's backing – and, as predicted, the rest of the councillors had fallen in line – and now he had explosives, and diggers – oh, and Psi Corps, breathing down his neck. Aspen had promised him that NewTech would pass up the problem, but, truth be told, he wasn't that sure about IPX's ability to handle the Corps. Mainline military, maybe, but a fringe division – as near to civilian status as jazz, basically – was unlikely to hold much sway. And, say what you like about the prissy little assholes, but Psi Corps had stacked their political deck to make any civilian opposition to them highly inadvisable.

Morden's little nudges to getting the use of a low-level teep had also not been particularly appreciated.

_What else was I supposed to do?_ He thought irritably. There was no way on God's green Earth – or His red Mars, come to that – that he was just going to _sit_ there and quietly go insane. Aspen had dangled that script in front of him, and he wasn't going to let it slip through his fingers. Besides, he thought, the bastard owed him. He'd worked himself into the ground for the Ikaaran analysis, and it had been snatched away and classified the moment he thought he was getting somewhere. This was even more fascinating, and his obsessive tendencies were coming front and centre in response. _If I was a pacing man, I'd have worn a groove into the hotel floor._ He grimaced. None of the usual tricks of calming himself down and diluting his focus had worked. It didn't help that he was cooped up inside - even when outside the hotel, because one dome-space was much like another - and the only place where he felt like he was under a bare sky was in an EVA suit back at the dig.

In any case, Psi Corps had been rather restrained thus far, only sending a rep to have a looking at base camp's seismic wave projections and tut in an appropriately worried manner. Still. All this restraint meant was that the team was left high and dry, with Morden waiting for the inevitable call to let him know that the place had been stormed by the bloodhounds.

That call – or one near enough - finally came in the middle of the night, and consisted of Kirkish spitting nails. Staggering out of bed, he blearily scrubbed a hand across his face and turned on two-way visual. Judging by the background, she was at base camp, and she was _not_ happy.

"Mary, calm down. What's happening?"

"Fragging Psi Corps, is what!" She shrieked, hysterical. "They sent a squad over here an hour ago, said the digging was setting off seismic disturbances, the domes were being compromised – they started shutting everything down – all the drivers and planners are packing up and disappearing – they're stopping _everything_ and Aspen won't answer his fragging phone!" Which explained why she'd called _him_, in any case. Kirkish was higher up in NewTech, with more resources and influence, and she was stuck just standing there, while base camp was disintegrating.

"What can I do?" He asked helplessly.

She hissed sharply and bit her lower lip. When she spoke again, she was back under control. "Nothing. There's nothing you can do – I know that, I wasn't asking – I just needed to scream at someone."

Someone who wasn't a psi cop, at any rate. Morden understood that well enough. "Well, give me an hour – I'll get out of here and track Aspen down. He might be able to do something."

She nodded tightly. "I'll stay here. Call in when you find him, all right?"

"Will do." He signed off. And sat there, thinking. _Well, this is it. Nice while it lasted._ Aspen, first, and then the inevitable helplessness, and everything being taken away – by the military, by Psi Corps, it didn't matter – and then – then –_then I'll never see the ship again._

His stomach rebelled; he barely made it to the bathroom in time.

*

Aspen looked as harried as Morden felt. His bushy hair had thinned a little, or otherwise it was greasy; at any rate, it was now flat against his head, ill advised combing keeping it in place. The beard was as luxurious as ever, but beginning to go grey. Prematurely so: Aspen was not immune to the pressures of the project, it appeared. Although it was possible that it was Mars itself that was aging them both so early: the gravity playing havoc with the body's understanding of time. Morden knew that it was a ludicrous thought, that a few months planet-side could not have such extreme effects and not be documented anywhere. Still, the symptoms persisted, in all those on the team: himself, Kirkish, her techs, Aspen - even the guards looked tired! The only person around him who didn't look like she'd acquired a few spare years down the back of the sofa was Denni, and she had one of those faces that only reluctantly aged. She'd probably still look fantastic at sixty, all chiselled cheekbones and glowing chocolate skin. Even dark circles didn't show under her eyes; Morden felt like he was walking around with two black eyes by comparison.

"Morden. I'd help if I could, but as I've already told Kirkish, there simply isn't anything I can do. I've already called Holtz, and he's stalling them for as long as possible. Beyond that -" he spread his hands.

_Perfect,_ Morden thought, disgusted. _I promise Holtz that I'll deal with psi corps, then dump them back in his lap. That's going to make me __really__ popular…_ Well, nothing he could do about it now. Fed up with the whole thing, he thanked Aspen perfunctorily and left.

Outside, he took a deep breath. He'd stopped by the dig on his way over - a little out of his way, admittedly - but he'd needed to calm down. No point in losing his temper. He bought a snack from a street vendor and sat on the brick steps, eating slowly. He thought about phoning Denni; rejected the idea. He didn't feel like the extra hassle right now, and she'd probably be busy at work anyway. And, anyway, he'd already waste enough precious time with all of this bureaucracy. Holtz could stop Psi Corps, or not, and there wasn't a great deal _he_ could do to influence the outcome. He might as well head back to the dig and get back down to the ship. Who knew how much time he'd be allowed with it?

He likes to think of himself as being good at his job, but knows the limitations of even the most proficient portfolio of experience in this arena. It's not a question of intelligence but of time: the human lifespan is ultimately inadequate to the task of studying something like this. There exist only a finite amount of words for the mind, despite its infinite complexity. Morden has studied languages for his entire life, and only knows of less than five hundred in all the dead and living languages still known. He views it as a manifestation of himself, because it is the only thing he knows to do; the physical expression of an internal need. He is that which is him - who and undivided - a multitude of selves surging forwards. He-who-_is_ can feel the shape of that-which-_might_-have-been, all smooth skin and tightly reined power and - something else, bottled up in tiny shards and fragments underfoot.

He started spending more time underground a few weeks previously; partly as a result of the impending Corps intervention, and partly because - well, he wasn't sure why. It didn't matter anyway, because everyone was doing the same: techs and researchers everywhere, the entire place crawling with activity. Morden, however, was decidedly _not_ active. He'd been at the underground chamber every day now, sitting. He isn't sure what he should be writing down, if anything - he has already recorded all that he has seen and heard, and all that he can extrapolate from this scant knowledge. All that is left is to sit by the ship, and _will_ it to answer.

(_Going_ crazy? There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that he's already lost.)

_Talk to me,_ he tried to project, his mind clumsy in its desperation and inexperience. He wished, now, that he had thought to ask one of the psi cops to stay; to maybe help. But what if they'd said no?

(What if they'd taken over?)

_I know you. I dream about you. Talk to me…_ He could feel the cold seep in through the scarce covering of the EVA suit, but thought, rather, that it came from the ship itself; the coldest thing there. How much time did he have left? How long would he be allowed to sit here and will a response from something thousands of years dead and forgotten; something so alien that his mind could not accept it as _alive_, but screamed at him, _run!_ He has sealed his terror of it as tightly as he could, putting it behind a closed door with no lock, nor key, nor seams to be prised open. It is sealed with whispered prayers and fury and hidden secrets and he thinks that not even the steel traps of a psi cop's mind could wrench it open.

_Talk to me_. The ship - silent, sleeping - did not answer. He raised a hand, a scant distance away from its skin, watching the colours change and pulse; mottled, mainly black.

*

"Did you look at the new sitters' resumes?"

"What?" He wasn't certain, but maybe non-human telepaths were the answer. Psi Corps weren't cooperating, but couldn't IPX hire a Centauri? Wouldn't that work? Or would the security considerations -

"I _said_, did you look at the child-minders' resumes?"

Denni stuck her hand in front of his face; startled, he jerked back and blinked. "I forgot."

"You forgot," she repeated flatly.

"Look, things have been busy, all right?" He picked up the excavation schedules, chewing over the extra cost and the security implications of bringing in an off-worlder.

"No, don't strain yourself on our account," Denni muttered. "I'll do it; I lead a life of leisure, after all."

"It's not that important, is it?" He asked vaguely, not really listening for an answer. Well, firstly, he'd have to speak to Aspen… "IPX can vet them all." He got up, wandering out of the kitchenette and back to the office area, still thinking. Kirkish, for all her enthusiasm, might have a problem with it, but the issue would be security. IPX would have a fit.

Someone set a sandwich in front of him with a loud clatter; he ate it without looking up. Eventually, the person talking above him - to him? - went away.

*


	8. Chapter 8

VIII.

The way Aspen had set up the dig was so that the uncovered portion of the ship was right at the base, almost beneath it, as they'd blasted away the rock all the way down, and then tunnelled across. It had let the prelim team run scans all the way through – or try to run them, at least, even though nothing showed up other than the overwhelming impression of _thereness_, as though the ship was somehow more _present_ than the rest of the universe. It was a good position, sheltered and with easy to control access to the site; it was also structurally sound, being as it was bounded through the rockface.

Eight months into the dig, it was also quite possibly the reason that the first blast from above didn't incinerate Morden where he stood.

He'd spent several weeks belowground - enough to make Aspen hint that not filling in his paperwork because of 'research' was not acceptable - watching, slowly, as the ship was freed piece by piece. _Talk to me,_ he'd 'say', and think himself mad, and do it anyway. He set up a cot at base camp so he could squeeze out every last second of contact with the ship and cut down on travel, and then ignored it, choosing to sleep on the catwalk. _Talk to me,_ he 'said', every day, and closed his eyes against the silence.

When the rumbling response finally came, as he had expected it to, as he had patiently waited for it, the sudden physical shock threw him forwards, almost catapulting him over the scaffolding barrier. He caught himself against the skin of the ship, hissing at the contact – sharp as acid – even though his protective gear. He had not touched the ship, yet. He had kept that small amount of sanity.

// _?_ //

It split Morden's shields wide open, stem to stern, pushing something slick and cold into his lifeblood. _Oh God,_ he thought, fighting against the nausea that suddenly assailed him. _Oh sweet Jesus. __I didn't think that._ His mouth flooded with bile and panic struck him, both within and without. His vision blurred and his knees buckled; he pitched forward, grabbing the railing and praying that he wouldn't throw up in his helmet, that air would come soon. His throat was opening and closing painfully, but his lungs somehow couldn't be convinced to work. He pawed at his throat, at his chest; the chain around his neck was red hot, fire against the thin fabric of his clothing. His mouth hung open, eyes glassy. _I'm gonna die,_ he thought, and it was the only clear thing in his head. He forced himself to focus, to figure out where he was; where the pain was coming from. _I'm gonna die,_ and his hand was still braced against the skin of the ship.

Pain spiralled out from the black fragments resting against him, at his hand and at his chest, sharp as any knife. // _?_ // the ship said, and pushed against him, licking at the edge of his mind.

His eyes rolled up in his head.

*

"Morden! Oh my God, Morden, wake up!"

Someone was shaking him, smacking his side. Shouting, too. "Whuh-," he grimaced, coughed, and tried again. "What's going on?" His throat felt like sandpaper. He tried opening his eyes, and found that he couldn't quite focus. Mary Kirkish's pale face swam into view, framed by the bright halo of her lit spacesuit helmet. "What happened?"

"Are you hurt?" She grabbed his arm without waiting for an answer and pulled him to his feet. He was still disoriented enough to be surprised by this, until it registered that he was on Mars, and all the physical laws were slightly askew. "Is your helmet damaged?"

"What's going on?" He patted himself down, checking the gauges on the side of his suit. Everything looked okay but, then, there still appeared to be three of her. "I'm fine. What happened?"

"I've no idea." She wouldn't look at him. "I found you face-down on the scaffolding. I thought you'd been hurt in the blasts."

Blasts? "Is someone attacking us?" The Minbari, his harried brain thought instantly. Visions of the smelted plastics of the Proxima domes swam in front of his eyes. He coughed and tried to take a deep breath. "What – who's attacking?"

"No one – not deliberately, anyway." She was still pulling him along the walkway, towards the exit.

Not deliberately. But the place was still being shaken to smithereens, with the metal scaffolding swaying with each tremor, like a wounded animal. _Oh God -_ he thought, and stopped in his tracks. _It's trying to free itself._ "Wait – Mary – I think I know what –"

She wasn't listening, but was simply dragging him along.

"Mary! I think it's the ship. I think – that's what causing the tremors."

She stopped at that, finally, and looked at him, blank-faced. They stood there, the metal catwalk shuddering and groaning around them. When she spoke, Mary's voice was too low for fury. "What. Did. You. _Do_?"

Nothing, he wanted to say, but his tongue was suddenly thick in his mouth. He couldn't speak; worse, the very _concept_ of speech was suddenly foreign to him. Who communicated like that anymore? Certainly he couldn't _talk_ to her about the ship; there were no words for what it had felt like to lean into it, to _hear_ it in his mind. He stared at her, mouth moving over aborted speech. Words that were _not_ words filled his vision, black-on-black bleeding into him, cold as ice in his veins. I'm not afraid, he wanted to say, you don't frighten me, I _want_ this, but the thoughts faded before they had even formed, and there was nothing in their place but the yawning maw of empty space. He may have made a sound, or maybe not; his limbs might have jerked, spasming and twisting as the first sliver of pain hit, but he did not notice. Someone was holding on to him, keeping him from falling, and it didn't matter because where else was there to fall? They were already here; there was no place deeper.

// _I know you,_ // came from within, in his own 'voice', skinned and worn across something older and more alive than anything he could comprehend. His legs folded, toppling him unceremoniously to the ground.

He might have been screaming.

*

He came to outside, his arm stretched across Kirkish's lap as she checked the gauges on his suit for life-signs. She felt him stir and wrapped an arm around him, helping him sit up.

"What the hell's going on?" He asked, somewhat plaintively, coughing through the grittiness in his throat. His filter had taken a battering, worse even than the customary Martian sandstorms.

She said nothing. The hard look had faded from her eyes – or had he imagined it in the first place? – and she just looked tired, now. Her blonde hair had slipped out from under the skinny cap, and it crowded her helmet like seawater.

"Mary? What's going on?"

She was silent for another long moment, calculating. Then, "you touched it, didn't you?"

It retrospect, it was disturbing how easily the lie came to him, sweet as milk and butter on his tongue. He didn't have to call it, or to try; it simply flowed through him, tumbling out of his lips. "Touched what?" He asked. His eyes were very wide; the picture of wounded innocence.

She looked away. "It doesn't matter." She nodded to the scene behind them. "It's all over now, anyway."

What was? Moving gingerly, he twisted in place, careful not to snag the EVA suit on any sharp rocks.

Behind them, the sky was on fire.

Fright flashes of light filled the sky, as far as the eye could see, illuminating the raised pockets of ignited dust to form brilliant clouds. _Martian weather,_ he thought hysterically. _All fire and brimstone - and, above it all, the war god looking down …_ He knew what he would see when he looked up; did it anyway. Above them, a black ship blotted out the sun, casting long shadows across the plumes of destruction in razor-sharp relief.

"It came a little while ago," Mary said quietly. She sounded as though she had been crying. "To free the other ship." Her breath hitched. "It _sang_ to it."

_I know,_ Morden thought, _I felt it wake. I felt it __sing__._ He said nothing.

They sat there, watching.

*


	9. Chapter 9

IX.

A flier came for them a few hours later; Aspen had sent teams out to comb for any survivors. _Eventually,_ Kirkish muttered vengefully. Aspen had _eventually_ sent teams out. Morden wasn't much concerned with the precise timing of the rescue, given that there _still_ appeared to be three of everything. One of the rescuers had basic med training, and demanded that he be taken to the nearest hospital; Morden wouldn't hear of it. "I've got to get back to base camp, to see what's happening."

"And bleed all over the furniture, most likely," Kirkish snapped.

He glared balefully. "I'm not just going to _sit here_ while god knows what is happening at back there!"

"Oh, right, but bleeding in your _brain_ is both proactive and enthusiastic, I see." She shoved him back in his seat when he attempted to stand. "Don't be a fool, Morden. Get to a hospital. You can go mourn over base camp later."

He was trying to struggle free, or to catch the pilot's attention. The pilot ignored him, too busy navigating the complex dome barriers at top speed, presumably bound for the Syria Planum hospital. "And while I'm trussed up like a turkey, where the hell are _you_ going to be?"

She smiled thinly. "I'm going to be at the main lab, of course. If I'm lucky, maybe I can get there before Psi Corps clears the place out."

*

The doctors pronounced him fine, if a little concussed. He was told to avoid falling on his head for the foreseeable future, and they sprayed something at him that ostensibly helped with these directives. One of the doctors - an older man with a receding hairline - waved a light at his eyes for a little bit and tutted, and told him to lay off the sleep meds for a bit. "A young man like you shouldn't need chemical enhancements," he pronounced with the air of a man who has lived a long and boring life through good food and no fun whatsoever. "Do some exercise; that'll tire you out plenty."

Not for the first time in his life, Morden wished a pox upon doctors who felt that exercise was the cure to all his problems, including sleeplessness and a flagging sex drive. "Thank you, I'll bear that in mind," he said through a wide smile, and waited, face frozen in that expression, while the doctor tutted some more and discharged him. Outside the hospital he found that he'd have to flag down a cab home, because the rescue team hadn't waited for him after dropping him off. Well, that made sense - they might still be needed out there. After debating a little, he opted to hire a flier for the rest of the day. He wasn't paranoid, he told himself. He just wanted to check on base camp.

Although… he chewed on his bottom lip and decided that he should probably swing by the hotel briefly to check on Denni and Sarah. It was unlikely that anything had happened, of course, but it was always good to be _sure_.

He opened the door to a woman's voice. "What do you _mean_, you can't contact him? This is an emergency!"

"What's an emergency?" he asked, bewildered.

Denni turned around so fast she almost toppled off her chair. "Morden!" Then, to the comm. link, "never mind!"

And, for the second time that day, he found himself on the ground with a woman atop him. He almost shoved her away reflexively, startled; there had been a fraction of a second where he hadn't recognised her. "This isn't allowed to happen again," he told the top of Denni's head gravely. "The doctors said so." He pushed her away gently. Had she changed her shampoo, her soap? She smelled different: unfamiliar, somehow.

"Doctors? Are you all right?" She let go of him and scooted back along his torso, ending up straddling his knees. "We saw the explosions - they were covered on the MarsNet - but no one would tell us what was happening, and I couldn't get through to you! _Are you all right?_"

Briefly, he told her - about the ship, about its rescue, and about the loss of the dig. Denni's mouth was open in a round 'O' of horror. "Was anyone _hurt_?"

He shrugged. He hadn't thought to ask. He pushed her off him gently, and stood. "Anyway. I just wanted to make sure that you and Sarah were okay before heading back to base camp. I want to make sure that the infrastructure laid down hasn't been damaged - we should still be able to recover most of the -"

The slap, when it came, was completely unexpected and left his ears ringing. He shook his head, bewildered. "Ow," he said, more shocked than hurt. "You _slapped_ me. You're not supposed to slap me. I'm concussed."

"Oh," Denni said, and her face was thunderous. "I'm going to do more than _slap_ you. I'm thinking of killing you, stuffing your corpse with your notes, and then setting fire to you atop the dome; do you have _any idea_ how worried I've been? How petrified that I'd look on MarsNet and see your charred corpse amidst the ruins - or that Aspen would call with his condolences? This wasn't a minor quake, Morden, it was a big fragging explosion -"

"Vaporisation," he corrected automatically.

Denni's mouth closed with an audible snap. She folded her arms; unfolded them; walked to the other side of the room; walked back. Her body was wound tight, anger and frustration screaming from every pore. Slowly, it ebbed away until she was standing spent; her shoulders slumped. There wasn't any of the fire that characterised their fights from years ago, nor the ice that signalled he'd forgotten something important. She just sounded tired. Defeated. "Right. Of course. Go, then. Go check on your precious data. I'm going to go to work - you know, because I spent most of today trying to locate your mortal remains. The next time, I'll know not to bother."

"Denni -"

"Just _go_, Morden." Her voice was very quiet. "I can't deal with this right now."

*

By the time he was halfway to base camp in his flier, the brief uncertainty over Denni had faded. She had her stuff to sort out, and he had his own crap to deal with; the _ship_, the _ship_ was _gone_, and he didn't need to think about all the rest of this right now. Denni wouldn't do anything rash; she was a sensible woman. She could wait a little while longer. But the ship -

God. He'd go to base camp, get his notes and lock everything away, maybe use one of those high-security vaults that the local banks were always bragging about. He believed that Kirkish was genuinely frightened of Psi Corps, but his own fear was not directed at that quarter but, rather, backwards: back on Earth, where EarthGov might pull their funding at any point. No ship meant no project; no project meant no need to let the team members have access to the research. And he'd be damned if he'd let them send a mission out here to clean them out. He drove the flier faster than the speed limit permitted, even outside the domes, reaching base camp in record speed.

Except...

The plateau was the same. There were the twin hills, vying for their part of the skyline; the blasted remains of the dig; even the metal struts sticking out of the ground - the only remainders of the reinforced catwalk stretching hundreds of feet below.

And there, also, was an empty space where base camp used to be.

*

He drove back at ridiculous speeds, lighting up several speed cameras on his way over, careless of the various fines and warnings he would receive. When he arrived at the main lab, he found Kirkish sitting on the front steps. Her customary blue jumpsuit was stained and dusty, as if she had been in a fight, and her make-up was streaky. She looked up at him as he approached.

"Mary, I just got back from base camp - my God, it's all gone! What the hell happened?"

She laughed slowly, high-pitched and brittle. "Psi Corps happened, of course. Just like I knew they would." She spread her hands, still laughing, as if it was the funniest thing in the world. "They came and took it all. Base camp, the archive upstairs, even the admin stuff - it's all gone."

All the blood drained from his face. Not Psi Corps - he didn't believe that - but EarthGov couldn't have sent anyone here in time - _oh God_. He swayed. "But the hardcopy work – it's all here, it's –"

She shook her head.

*

He ran up seven flights of stairs, past the administrative offices to where the storage compartments were. He'd taken each and every piece of data he'd gathered and stored it here with all of his findings, hardcopy and in crystal format, and backed up twice for safety. Everything – everything! – was in this storage area, with armed guards at the door and retina scans and passwords and _God-fragging-damn it!_

By the time Denni got home that day, tired and sweaty from what had been an emotionally exhausting few hours, the entirety of her clothing – and Morden's – was strewn across their bed. "What're you doing?"

"Sarah's asleep," he said, and went back to packing.

"I'm being quiet. What are you doing?" She grabbed his shirt - not his arm, he noted; his shirt - stilling him. "Jesus. You've been acting insane for I don't know how long, and now _this_ - talk to me!"

He let his breath out in one big gulp, like he couldn't hold it in his body any longer. "You win, Denni. All of it - my so-called 'obsession' - it's over. All of it. We're going back."

Her face went slack as her grip tightened, as if all the rage was being transferred down her arm and into him. "What are you talking about? First that performance this morning, now this - and after weeks of I don't know what, forgetting things and zoning out - are you still concussed?"

He smiled at this.

She let go as if she'd been burnt, and he finally looked at her. Whatever she saw in his face made her pale. "Christ, Morden," she said quietly. "What the hell happened to you?"

What could have happened? It was almost funny. He spread his hands wide; the jazz-hands of a car salesman. _Ta da! And here's nothin' for ya!_ "There was nothing left."

This was somehow impossible to grasp. She frowned tremulously. He didn't blame her; he didn't really believe it himself. Any minute now, he'd be fielding a call from Aspen or Kirkish, laughing at the jape and waving holos of his face when he saw the empty room. _You should have seen your expression! Man, are you gullible or what?_

"I went in to base camp, and it was like it never existed. And - back at the main lab, and someone had been there too. They'd cleaned the place out, Den. They took everything - everything! All the back-ups, all the hardcopy, all the crystals, all the fragging computers. There wasn't anything left." Just dust, he remembered that – Martian dust, always getting into everything, and coating the computers and cabinets and people with a faint film. Probably from the ship itself, from that first mushroom cloud of Martian sand and dust rising hundreds of feet up in the air, so bright and so terrifying that the populace had threatened to riot.

"So you came back here and started packing."

"So I came back here and started packing," he agreed, and laughed.

Denni's hands fluttered a little, like startled birds, trying to find a way to soothe him without actually touching him. She'd been doing that for a while now, he thought, still holding the bundle of clothing in his hands, twisting it into rope. Their shifts hadn't aligned for a while, so they'd only been nominally sharing a bed, and what did they do in it other than the odd grope when Sarah was asleep? And when was the last time they'd done that, anyway? He couldn't remember. Before he lost the ship, certainly. Maybe even earlier; he'd spent that month at base camp, and before then it had been Psi Corps, and before then… When? How far back had they stopped sharing a space and simply passed each other like ships in the night? When had she stopped touching him? He didn't remember; he hadn't noticed when she'd stopped. _Wouldn't a normal guy notice?_

No, of course not. Not if he was busy. And he'd been busy. It wasn't make-work, it wasn't some stupid administrative task that could wait until the next day. Not if you couldn't sleep, anyway.

It's funny. He half-thought that maybe the dreams would stop when the ship went away. And maybe they would. Maybe it just hadn't been long enough yet; the wound still open and bleeding.

"I'm tired, Denni," he finally said. "I just want to get away from here."

The set of her jaw, the folded arms - everything - and she was glaring, too. He didn't need to look at her to know; he could feel the heat of it on his skin. Warmer than her actual touch would have been, maybe. He couldn't remember anymore. "I'm not going anywhere."

A quiet pitter-patter behind them, and he turned to catch a faint flicker of light from the other side of the room.

"Are we leaving?" Sarah stood in the doorway, letting the light from her room shine through and clutching at her jumpsuit in distress. Her voice held the shrillness of lost dollies and ailing pets.

"Go back to bed, sweetheart," Denni said quietly. She stood, casting one last furious glance in his direction, and took Sarah's hand in hers. "We'll talk about this in the morning, okay?"

"No!" Sarah's favourite word, perfected. "Talk _now_!"

Denni made soothing, shushing noises, and picked the child up, tucking her against one hip easily. Neither one of them looked back at Morden.

He set the clothes to one side. Dropped them, maybe; it didn't matter. Suddenly tired to his very core, he lay back down on the bed. In the next room, he heard Denni murmuring softly, and Sarah's insistent demands for information. Eventually, both voices petered off. He closed his eyes.

The quiet, dark hum of the voices rose again. _I'm making it up_, he thought drowsily. _I don't have a clue how it would sound._ Lies. He knew he wouldn't need to 'hear' it. He'd feel it, as he felt it now - deep in his bones, through flesh and muscle and snapping gristle, so deep the marrow ran thick with it, flooding his body until he couldn't breathe. No. He didn't know how it would sound. _Oh God, let it fade, please -_ Just that sound didn't matter.

If Denni came back to their bed, he didn't wake to notice.

*


	10. Chapter 10

**2254**

**

* * *

  
**

X.

Routine took over, foul and uninviting. Aspen and the rest were recalled to Earth and other projects; the team scattered as far as human exploration dared. Morden was one of the few who opted to stay and were allowed to do so: Holtz, again. He still lived in same hotel room, sharing a space with Denni that seemed a little cooler with every passing day. 'Familiar strangers', Denni called their situation somewhat derisively, but he wasn't even sure that they were _that_ anymore.

He hadn't remembered Sarah's 4th birthday, either.

Work-wise, the grip of academia grew a little tighter, and his patience with it all a little thinner. He ached for something he did not understand and could not, in truth, remember, dosing himself with REM-less pills and sleepwalking through his lectures. _I wonder what the others are doing,_ he often thought, more by reflex than by any genuine curiosity. His former fellow team members were simply out of sight and thus out of mind, and would that all things in his new life could be that simple!

He thought that Kirkish had gone off-world, like the rest of the team, so was understandably surprised when he found her waiting outside the Syria Planum University's lecture theatre one morning. She wore black slacks and a black sweater - non-clothes, and a world away from her familiar blue jumpsuit - and her hair was shorter, and dyed dark brown. He almost didn't recognise her. "Morden?"

He almost dropped the stack he'd been carrying. A couple of lagging students - doubtless waiting to make eyes at him in the hope of raising their grade - ran to help him. He waved them off and settled the stack back on the desk. "Mary? My God. I haven't seen you in months! How are you? You look - different." She looked awful. Dark hair did not suit her, and nor did dark clothes. Her pale skin looked washed-out beneath them, and thin as tissue paper. She had dark shadows under her eyes, deepened by the neon lighting inside the emptying lecture theatre.

"Morden. Do you have a minute?"

"I - yes." His next class wouldn't be for another couple of hours. It was a little early for food, but - "Coffee?"

"Sure."

They sat in the canteen, seated in one of the far corners on plastic chairs, their coffee in plastic mugs and resting on a plastic table that teetered uncertainly whenever either of them leaned against it. "I thought you'd left Mars for pastures new," Morden said, attacking his portion of allotted caffeine with gusto. It was all Earth-imported; the only luxury he bothered with.

"I did."

"Where did you end up going? I didn't hear anything through the IPX newscasts." He still kept up with the feed, even though there was hardly anything on there to interest him anymore. But, then, what else was he supposed to do? The university had plenty of feeds but not much on them; the linguistics department was so up-and-coming that he'd ended up as the head of it, more or less by accident. Morden thought that maybe Holtz had pulled a few strings to get him the position. Not tenured, though: that brought with it guaranteed Martian citizenship, and Holtz had seemed to him a bit skittish on the subject. At any rate, he had his office, with his name on the door, a hundred or so adoring students, mainly female, and a collection of archaeological artefacts gathering dust on the shelf.

He was honestly surprised to see Mary Kirkish again. He had thought that she had disappeared back into the main PIX pool of project-work. He supposed that it was the way of all things bright and fascinating: the biotechs, the guards, the systems techs, _everyone_, in short, needed a bit of a break. And Mars wasn't precisely Terra Nova, what with one quarter of the population below the Earth Alliance poverty line and the domes still under threat. He wasn't surprised that most of the others had scattered; he thought that he would have liked to go someplace else himself. He'd tried, even; it was Denni, in truth, who'd kept him here.

"Where are you going to go, then? Earth? Or some other forsaken place, to live out of a suitcase for months at a time? And what am I supposed to tell Sarah in the meantime?"

You could come with me, he'd told her, lying.

She'd laughed in his face. "You go, then. Go if you need to. But I'm staying right here, and so is Sarah."

So, he'd stayed, mainly because she was right: there wasn't anywhere for him to go. _Wherever you go, there you are_, his mother had used to say, God rest her soul. And wherever he went, his brain went with him. And his dreams.

Especially his dreams.

("Well," Denni said, finding a pack of the REM-less pills in his bag. "This explains a lot."

It's not like that, he'd wanted to say, not at all. It's the _opposite_ of what you think; I'm not taking too many, I'm not taking _enough_, I can't make the dreams stop without them.

His mouth stayed stubbornly closed as if speech, too, was another thing he had forgotten.)

"Where have I been? I suppose I've just been around," Kirkish said at last. "Keeping out of sight, mostly."

_That_ caught his attention. "What do you mean?"

She lowered her voice. "Psi Corps."

"What about them?"

"Haven't you noticed what's been happening? Eric Lustig, Yasser Onweni - the rest of them -"

"What about them?" he asked helplessly. He didn't recognise either of those names.

"They were biotechs. Both of them died recently."

"I'm sorry. How did it happen?"

Kirkish waved a hand to indicate the universe. "Oh, they made it look like industrial accidents, but I know what happened. They wouldn't stay put, they wouldn't cooperate, so Psi Corps killed them."

Silence. "Oh," Morden said at last, at a loss as to what to say other than that. _She's gone off the deep end, and no mistake._ "Are you sure?"

"Yes!" And she launched into a detailed explanation - with visibly restrained hand-waving - as to how she knew, for a fact, that Psi Corps had killed two insignificant biotechs whose names Morden had never bothered to learn.

_It's a hell of a shame to lose Kirkish this way,_ he thought. _She was always a bit on the wary side, but I didn't think that she'd slip into out-and-out paranoia._ "Mmmmm," he said in all the right places, and otherwise tuned her out. His eyes skipped across her form, taking her in and weighting it all and judging her in one swift movement. She was tired, yes, and possibly sleep-deprived. She'd also lost some weight, and as she'd never been precisely plump, it showed in the thinnest of her limbs. Her wrist bones jutted out like wounded birds, all angles and thin, papery skin. She sipped her coffee too quickly, as if trying to get it all inside before she'd have to dash off again; he did not doubt that she ate the same way.

"I'm leaving," she said, the coffee leaving a thin film against her upper lip. She licked it away anxiously, her tongue darting out. "I was passing through Mars - sometimes you have to backtrack - and I wanted to warn you. You're safe as long as you stay still, somewhere visible. They don't worry about you then. They don't have to pin you down anywhere. And the Mars councillors - you're visible - they'd notice if you disappeared. But -" she tore another packet of sugar open and dumped the contents into her half-empty mug. "Just in case you do decide to leave _soon_." She said it as if it had some significance. "I wanted to warn you."

"All right," he said. "That was very kind of you, Mary." He knew better than to pretend collusion when he did not believe her, but neither was he confrontational. "I can't say that I've noticed anything, but, as you say, I've been planet-bound since the dig. If I decide to leave, I'll keep your warning in mind." He called a waiter over, and ordered them each a sandwich.

_Mad_, he thought, walking home afterwards. _She's gone completely mad._ And how had he appeared to her? He'd drifted off at some point, only for a second or two, but enough to catch her notice. It was a tiny moment of inattention, but it nagged at him. A few months previously, his attention wouldn't have wandered. Was this, then, the first signs of inertia, of a loss of intellect of - God help him - _age_? He had been feeling run-down as of late; older than his years would indicate. _Maybe it was the ship's influence,_ he thought, not for the first time. _All that radiation - it could have had long-term effects…_ And if it had affected him - his concentration, his focus, his ability to think about his lexicographic research, or Sarah's birthday, or Denni's day, or anything other than the fragging _ship_…! - of course, of _course_ it could have affected Mary Kirkish. No, more than that - it was even more likely that it had. That it had affected _all_ of them, to varying degrees. That those biotechs had been clumsy, yes, and so those accidents had come about; that Kirkish's natural wariness of Psi Corps had been amplified to out-and-out paranoia...

That his own mind was now a foreign place. It was more than possible. In fact, it was beginning to look likely.

*

He took the long way home. He was increasingly choosing this path, even though it added at least an hour to his journey. He got home past dinnertime, surprised to discover that Denni wasn't there. Sarah had already been collected from school, and the sitter was helping her put various multi-coloured blocks together and knock them down again.

"Daddy!" Sarah squealed and jumped up. She ran to him and he fell to one knee, arms outstretched. Shyness suddenly overtook her; she little hid her face in her hands, stopping just short of his grasp. "Daddy?"

"Hi honey," he pulled her in, tucking her against one hip. She wriggled, evidently uncomfortable, and turned her face away when he tried to give her a kiss. "How was school?"

She mumbled something against his neck and kicked, wriggling desperately.

"All right. I guess you don't want to be held today." He set her down and off she went, hiding behind David's shoulder. "Hello, David," he belatedly remembered to say. The sitter was so quiet and kept Sarah so studiously occupied that often Morden could forget that either of them were in the room. "How was she today?"

"Good, Dr Morden," David said, and smoothed Sarah's unruly caramel hair. "Very happy, very inquisitive. They were doing some finger-painting in class, she was very excited. I don't know why she's become so shy so suddenly."

_She doesn't like strangers,_ Morden thought but didn't say. "Well, that's fine. I can take over - you can have the rest of the evening off, if you like."

David didn't wait to be told twice. "Thank you."

Sarah hid behind a sofa for a full hour and refused to come out, only emerging when she heard her mother's voice in the hallway. "Argh! Bureaucrats!" Denni raged, stomping into the main living area. She seemed surprised to see him; expecting the sitter, probably.

Morden tried to look sympathetic. "Bad day?"

Denni slammed her bag down on the table. "Engineers!" She fumed.

Morden raised an eyebrow at that, vaguely alarmed at the use of one of Denni's worst epithets. "What happened?" He asked tentatively, folding his paper.

"You would not believe the day I've had! These paper-pushers wouldn't know a good idea if it jumped up and bit them. I was talking to Elena Yan about starting up the -"

Whatever Denni had to say was cut off by the quiet beep of the incoming call. He looked at her apologetically. "Hold that rant."

He toggled the main comm. switch and settled in front of it. "Morden, go." A familiar face resolved out of the opening static. "Aspen!"

"Hello, Morden," Aspen's bearded face smiled back. "I hoped you'd still be at the same place."

"My God. I haven't spoken to anyone from the team in months, and now two in one day!"

"Ah, so she contacted you too, hmm?" Aspen raised an eyebrow. "Yes, we do seem to have rather lost Mary to her demons. But that's enough of that; I didn't call interstellar to reminisce."

"Oh?"

"No. Listen - I've got a job for you, if you're interested."

Morden could feel his eyebrows climbing to his hairline in response to both Aspen's words and to Denni's stare, drilling its way into his left shoulder blade. "What sort of job?"

"Set your comm. to receive - have a look at these." Glyphs filled the screen, carved into the familiar stone monuments; some into what looked like walls; some into - God - some across the bruised, blue-black skin that seemed to pattern the inside of his eyelids. Aspen smiled. "Look familiar?"

He forgot to get back to Denni's bad day that evening, too busy looking the prelim data over, and by the time he remembered the next day, there was no point in inquiring. He rather thought that asking might make it a great deal worse.

*


	11. Chapter 11

**2255**

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* * *

  
**

XI.

When Aspen's new consultant finally arrived a couple of months later, he was irrationally surprised at how young she was; more so, when he checked her file and found them to be of an age. His brief stint on Mars had aged him; or maybe he just _felt_ older, which was the same thing, really.

"So, where's good to eat around here?"

He blinked, somewhat stumped. He couldn't remember going out to eat; NewTech and the hotel had taken care of him when he'd been tied up with the dig, and now that he was doing civilian work, he took most of his meals at the university. Denni liked dining out, though, and she took Sarah to restaurants, meeting up with work colleagues and friends, he supposed. She'd asked him to come along a few times, but he'd always been too busy, and eventually the invitations had petered off. Where had she mentioned was good? "_The Lotus Garden_," he decided at last. He waited for Sheridan while she dropped off her luggage at the hotel, and they took a flier out to the northern quarter.

Once seated, they ordered, and Morden was surprised to find that the food was indeed very good, and that he was, in fact, famished. "So. What brings you out to Mars, Dr Sheridan?"

She smiled a little cheekily at him and flicked her hair out of the way. "Fishing for compliments already, Dr Morden? That doesn't sound like the quiet, brilliant young linguist I've been sent to recruit." She twisted spaghetti around her fork. More adventurous than him, she'd ordered one of the local sauces, made with locally grown ingredients; he'd specified imported produce only.

He smiled, rueful. "Just Morden's fine. And - I can see how it might have sounded. But surely this could have been accomplished by Aspen, a data pad and an uplink terminal; it's not cost effective to send you all the way out here. It makes no sense."

"Mmm. True, if we were looking to recruit support staff, or someone new - or even if we wanted you to work as a consultant - we wouldn't have bothered."

That was surprising. "What else would I work as?"

"How about - Head of Linguistics, NewTech division?"

He laughed. "I'm not anywhere near qualified for that."

"No, not yet. But if you come along on this upcoming mission, you will be."

"Anna," he said slowly, "no single mission is going to give me this amount of experience. Two months on the Rim are not enough, not when I'd be heading up -"

"Yeah. But this isn't two months, Morden! I mean, sure," she flicked her hair again, "the initial dig is going to be two months, sorry, I misspoke. But IPX is planning to set up a base on the planet and do a thorough excavation. The company directors are really excited about this - Aspen recorded the meeting they had when the prelims came through, and they were practically jumping up and down. Given what came out of Ikaara 7 -"

"I wouldn't know about that."

"No - sorry. But that's why I'm here! They need someone to stay out there, and oversee the translation of what's found. They don't want the bureaucrats in EarthGov looking over their shoulder at the transmitted data, and then moving in to classify everything again."

"So - that's why they want the linguistics done on site?" It made sense, when you thought of it that way. IPX couldn't afford to lose more projects because they might be _too_ profitable in the future; better keep the lid on everything until they could go public with the lot. At least, it's how _he'd_ do it. "The work would all be done in situ -" No, _wait_, he wasn't considering this again! He'd had IPX screw him over twice already; he'd be damned if he'd let it happen again! He coughed and frowned into his drink. "Listen, Anna, I understand what you're saying. But you have to see my perspective on this - I've had IPX projects fall through twice now, and I'm a little sick of it."

"A little sick of it," she echoed thoughtfully. "Yes, I can see that."

He looked down to where he'd shredded his paper napkin; long, thin strips across the remains of his rice. He prodded it, disgusted, with his fork, and pushed it to one side. "OK, I've been a little on edge lately." That was the understatement of the century. He had managed to start sleeping again, if by 'sleeping' one meant drugging himself into a stupor. The human mind can't cope without REM sleep, his doctor had informed him patiently. And if his dreams were truly that bad, perhaps he should approach the Psi Corps' mental health division for assistance.

Anna Sheridan's look was calculating. "Yes. I see that academia hasn't been treating you too well."

He frowned at her but said nothing.

She sighed, and put her fork down. "Let me ask you for a favour, then. You don't have to agree to join the team, or to consult, or anything of the sort - just agree to meet with me again, and let me explain what NewTech is proposing. Let me show you what prelim data we've gathered." She leaned forward, her eyes shining. "Let me show you _them_."

"Them?"

"Your initial report spoke about the ship-builders. We know that they carved the monoliths on Ikaara 7," she nodded at the shard of rock still around his neck; he flushed. "We also know that it was their ship that was recovered from the Syria Planum dig two years ago. We've found similar monoliths on this world, but not in any one place, not on the surface, and not uniformly. Instead, they are below ground, some deep, some only a few metres. And they're not like the ones you've looked at thus far."

"I don't understand," he said woodenly, furiously crushing the sudden flare of interest that this sparked.

"Don't you? I think you do."

"This is getting us nowhere," he said flatly. He was beginning to grow angry - at her, at himself for meeting her all, at Aspen most of all, for starting this up _again_. How many more times must that man uproot him?

"So come prove me wrong. Or right. Or - both. Come _look_ at them, Morden! We can't send the data back, not until we've finished, and, without you, we may _never_ be finished. We're not talking about one or two sites; this is an entire planet. IPX is pumping thousands of credits into this, pulling people off other projects left, right and centre. They want answers. And so do I." She looked at him. "Don't you?"

He laughed, hollow and bitter. "What I want," he murmured, "doesn't matter." _But I'll never be able to live with myself if I don't at least __look__._ He swallowed hard. "But, I admit that it is an interesting premise. So I will meet with you again, Anna. And you can tell me about these ship-builders of yours."

That night, he slept fitfully, restless in slumber. Denni was curled up away from him, as far away as she could get while remaining in the same bed. He had not been a calm sleeper for a while now, and unless he'd taken a pill for a night of REM-less sleep, his dreams made him shake uncontrollably. He had always hated to be touched in sleep; now, it was worse that ever. He woke several times, and finally poured himself a glass of wine; took a sleeping pill. A normal one, though, nothing REM-less. He slept. And he dreamed.

The ships were back, high in the Martian sky, and there were many more of them. They flooded the horizon with long, ink-black limbs, their skin glistening with the sun's rays, the colours changing; mottled and dark. Shapes slid across them, curlicues and Latinate, Cyrillic, Sumarian letters, letters from all the languages he knew, twisted out of all recognition, all present, all inadequate. _Talk to me!_ he called to them, stretching up on tip-toe as he had done as a small child, reaching for the sky. _Stay!_ A buzzing grew in his mind; friction-noise, from two incompatible things wrapped around each other, trying to communicate. He hadn't been sure, before, if the ship knew him - if it knew that _he_ knew it - but he was sure now. Oh, Lord, he was sure. How could he not be, when he dreamt of That Night every time he closed his eyes?

In his mind's eye, he felt the ship's cool, curious intellect press against him again, slick and wet and unyielding.

*

"The mission brief is simple: establish a base on the world -"

"And loot it for IPX before EarthGov has the chance?"

Sheridan frowned at his phrasing. "And document any advances to be gained," she corrected him severely. "We're not there to strip-mine the world. It's likely that there's a very good reason it isn't inhabited any longer. And, to be honest, Aspen isn't certain that there is anything to be gained in terms of biotech."

"So why send a biotech-heavy team?"

"He's _not_. You don't see Mary Kirkish's name anywhere on the team list, do you?"

"Mary Kirkish," he said quietly, "has gone off the deep end."

"Well, that may well be. But she's still the foremost expert on biotech, and Aspen's not using her for this anyway. He's bringing quite a few biotechs, but that's simply in terms of numbers. We've found bits of _things_ - no ID as yet - all over the planet's surface, so they'll need to be strong in manpower. Linguistics is where this mission is really focusing, though, and that's why they want you."

"There are more qualified people out there," he said, reaching for the familiar self-deprecation that had characterised his early academic career, vaguely surprised that it no longer rang as sincerely as it once had.

Sheridan laughed, not fooled. "Ones that have had their PhD's for longer than three seconds, yes. Ones that have had two separate instances of studying these glyphs before, no. Aspen is very focused on having this language deciphered."

Morden frowned at that and sipped his coffee. It sounded a little too good to be true, and he'd already had Aspen's empty promises dangled in front of his star-filled eyes a little too often to be taken in that easily. "I don't know. It doesn't sound particularly different from what went before. Sure, you'll maybe hold on to the site for a little longer, but that just means even more months living in an EVA suit on a dead world - and, listen, I'm pretty settled here. I could bring my wife and kid to Mars - it was hard, but they needed engineers, so Denni was able to get settled in - but I can hardly ask them to come out to the Rim and live on a ship." Except, it hadn't been like that, had it? _Denni_ had been the one to send him here; she'd done it all for him.

"No," Sheridan acknowledged. "This is a strict team-only mission. No family of any kind."

"So you see my point. Spend several months locked in a tin can, only to have EarthGov take it all away again. And for what?"

Sheridan worried at her hair for a little bit. He'd noticed that nervous tic before; it was relatively common in women with long hair, and a dead give-away of nerves. She was on edge, and, hell. She'd come all the way out there; Aspen would be pissed if he'd pushed the boat out and she couldn't get him on board. Still, there was no point in jumping for joy at EarthGov's scraps; he wasn't twenty-five anymore, and there was only so much grunt work he was willing to sacrifice on the altar of future career development. "Anna? This is your cue to up the ante."

She glared at him, eyes flashing. "Oh, you've been waiting for it, have you?"

"That's right. And so have you. You _knew_ I wouldn't be interested in what you've said thus far. Yet you came all the way out here - which makes me think that there's something else." He steepled his fingers and smiled. "Want to tell me what that something is?"

Her smile was a little vicious. "I think you already know, and are a bit scared - isn't that right?" At his startled look, her face turned triumphant. "It's not a secondary language. We've had the prelim work redone twice, based on your guidelines, and there's no mistaking it. It's the root tongue, and it's not in any one place; it's all over the planet in various forms, even earlier than the base tongue your original paper surmised must exist." She leaned forward across the table. Her eyes were very wide and very bright. "Morden - I don't think that this is a world visited by the ship-makers; I think that this _is_ their world, their home planet!"

He was silent for a moment. "There's no evidence to support that," he said thickly, past the lump in his throat.

"Don't you trust your own semantic structures?" She flashed that smile again, wide and predatory. "It's the ship-builders' world, Morden. Their home planet. Isn't this what you've wanted for so long, what you've been waiting for and dreaming about? _Think about it!_"

He likes to tell himself that he hasn't thought about it, and that he isn't going to. It's not quite a lie; he _had_ thought on it, obviously, but only insofar as everyone thinks on their desires, but not consciously. Instead, his vague wanting had been secret and furtive, hiding even from him, winding itself around his dreams and cloaking itself in guilt. Every time he woke up he remembered to feel guilty; every time he looked at Denni he remembered that something had gone wrong. He had built his life up from nothing so carefully, stretching every link to its maximum, pulling at it this way and that, splitting himself open with a single blow and inserting a stone – red and smooth and bloody in the night sky – to keep the wound wide open.

Did he want that? He didn't want to stop bleeding; no, certainly not that. The simple things: he wanted the ship back, of course. He wanted Psi Corps to go hang, and most of IPX, come to think of it. He wanted Denni to touch him again, and not look at him and then look quickly away, as she'd started doing two years ago and never quite stopped. He wanted his students to stop calling him Dr Morden and bringing him 'delicacies' from Earth to curry favour for their upcoming assessments. He wanted to care about tenure, or to not have to worry about it, or to be doing something that mattered to him. He wanted more time with Sarah, or less time with Sarah, or _something_ - he wasn't quite sure – but, anyway, she wasn't his little girl anymore, but her mother's daughter through and through. He wanted the dust to ease and finish falling, because for two years it still overloaded the filters and got through anyway, coating everything and making it seem aged and decrepit. He wanted Mars terraformed, or abandoned, or bombed into nothingness, and he wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay, and he wanted to be able to look at his work again.

He wanted to sleep again. He wanted dreams that were pleasant and filled with Norse runes and Minbari characters and Egyptian glyphs and naked women. He wanted to dream in many colours, and not in black-on-red, with his head pounding and heat pooling in his belly until he'd wake up and jerk off silently, curled up into himself so's not to wake Denni (who likely knew anyway and that's possibly why she reacted as if his touch made her skin crawl). He wanted to play baseball again, and run on green grass again, and not close his eyes and see a red Mars shining directly above, like the sun itself, and black spiders crawling across it, building their webs and eating him alive.

Mostly, though – God, mostly, he _wanted_. It wasn't logical or rational or calm or collected, but something fierce, something that twisted in him like a knife in his gut. _He wanted._ Something deep inside him stirred; // _?_ // it said, sweet and low and forbidden, as it had said before. _What is it, what are you asking, __talk to me__!_

"Morden?" Denni touched the nightlight, and the room was softly illuminated. "You were talking in your sleep."

He stared at the ceiling.

*

It's maybe significant that he hasn't had sex with Denni in over a year. No, longer than that – nearly two years, now. It's possibly even more significant that he finds himself not missing it, which is odd, to be sure. Back on earth, he was very tactile, always pulling her into his lap or stroking some bit of skin he could reach.

"Are you planning on going?" She asked him, calm and reasonable, pouring them both coffee and plunking it in front of him. "Is that it?"

He gave her a measured look. "I hadn't decided yet."

Denni's lips thinned. "Maybe you should," she said.

That caught his attention. He folded his arms, and then unfolded them again; painfully aware of how defensive he looked. "I know," he said. "Look, I know. I've been distracted for the last –" God – "- year or so. I haven't been around."

"You've been a ghost," she said sadly. "It's like living with a corpse, Morden. And I can't do that anymore."

_I'm not dead enough to matter to you,_ he heard in his head, as if she'd only just said it; as if she'd seen this already. He wasn't the least bit surprised to taste bile.

He called Sheridan that afternoon. "I can't."

*


	12. Chapter 12

XII.

"What are you doing here?" Anna found him nodding off in a corner of the spaceport, slumped in a chair. "I thought you weren't coming."

He grimaced and ran a hand through his hair, knowing that he looked a state. His hair was unmanageable at the best of times, and he hadn't bothered with it for weeks, letting it grow wild and curly. He'd made a half-hearted attempt at shaving a couple of days past, enough to leave him with scratchy, uncomfortable stubble and a residual soreness. Maybe that wasn't from the shaving, though; the soreness seemed to be everywhere, seeping through his bones. While the rest of the Earth-born around him were exclaiming over the wonders of Martian gravity, he dragged himself from lecture to lecture like an old man, regurgitating the same tired old lessons for the undergrads, handing out grades and demerits indiscriminately. He showered every day, paying double for the privilege of so much water usage, standing under the hot spray until he'd washed the darkness of sleep away. He remembers when he used to shower _after_ work, scrubbing at the perennial dust that got through the filters and onto everything. Now, it's all he can do to make himself get up and get in the shower, trying to wash away the lingering, oily smell of sleep and nightmares.

"I wanted to see you off," he said.

She tipped her head to the side, her hair spilling across her black-clad shoulders in waves. "You don't sound very sure."

"No," he said, quiet. "I'm needed here." He spread his hands helplessly. "I just… wanted to wish you luck." He gestured towards the stack of flimsies and the three pads he'd brought along. "I wrote up some prelim thoughts on the, the semantic bridges, and -"

"How very noble of you," she mocked quietly. She fingered the clasp on her bag; silver-on-black. "So selfless."

"I have a child, Anna. And Denni needs me."

She frowned. "And, what, my husband doesn't need _me_? I'm doing this for my health?"

He blinked at that, a little surprised. He hadn't known she was married. "People are different," he said instead.

"Not really. Not when it comes to something like this. You think that Denni would hesitate if she was offered her dream on a platter?"

"I've had that happen before," he reminded her. Somehow, he'd taken a step forward. "Twice, in fact."

Her eyes were very large, and very kind, the pupils flooding them until he couldn't see the iris at all. "And then they took it all away."

He took another step forward. "Yes."

He thinks that maybe she's laughing at him a little, or trying to seduce him. _Something_ is not right, and he cannot believe that the wrongness is inside of him, that it wasn't brought here by this woman and her Mars-red hair. She shook her head again, and smiled. "And what if you took it back?" Her smile was very bright and very hungry; all teeth and appetite. "Forget about Denni. She's a grown woman. Forget about trying to justify your existence with how much she needs you, and how much your students need you, and how much your work needs you, because it's a lie, Morden. You're not here for them; you're not here _for_ anything at all. You're here because you're scared. But -" she reached out and tapped her nail against the slice of black rock, scratching lightly, "You wouldn't wear this if any of that truly mattered. What _matters_ is working out what you want – what keeps you awake at night, what makes your blood sing and your toes curl to think of it – and then _taking_ it."

"And if they take it away?" He was dizzy from the caffeine and the adrenaline and from her _smell_, heavy with sleep and raw hunger.

Inches away from him, she rose up on her tiptoes to whisper in his ear. "Then you fight. You take it right back." She leaned back on her heels, smile wide and self-satisfied; the look of those anticipating a truly _excellent_ meal. Morden felt something inside him twist and give way in response. "So. Let me ask you a very simple question, Mr Morden. What do you want?"

*

end


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